My Name is Kate

Why I didn't write a blog post this week

I'm trying to post at least once a week. I didn't really mention my new blogging goals for this year because 1) no one cares and 2) see #1. I did decide not to talk about marketing all the time which has made me happier and possibly more interesting. So, Wednesday is my day to write a new post. Today is Wednesday. And I have a LOT of great blog post ideas in my Wunderlist "Great Blog Post Ideas" List.

But none of them are really speaking to me.

And then I saw this post on how to blog in 5 minutes a day. Which is great if I wanted to a) slap up my audio file on the blog or b) then spend 20 minutes transcribing. Plus, that 5 minutes doesn't really include cleaning up the formatting and adding links and pictures. So, I kind of think that post is bullshit. Though I did read on Penelope Trunk's blog about how she is experimenting with dictating her posts to her trusty assistant, Melissa.

I need a trusty assistant.

But at present, I don't have one.

And that isn't really why I couldn't pull it together to write a post.

In reality, these are the reasons this post didn't get written:

1. ZOMG, millions of cute sharpei. If we're friends on Facebook, you may have seen that I posted this picture (via Pei People) earlier in the week. It's now my desktop wallpaper. I can't stop looking at these dogs. What if we had 5 more Emmy Lous?!? (If you have a dog and want an invite to Pack, leave a comment - I have a couple).

2. Sun and Booze. We just booked our fall vacation to Mexico. I can't stop looking at pictures and reviews of the resort. We've been there twice before. We know what to expect. But I am obsessing. This is a picture from a couple of years ago - I took it while sitting on a chaise lounge next to the Refresh bar. I can't wait to be there again.

3. My ongoing iPad game obsession is Kingdom Rush. Yeah, it's a tower defense game. But it is the best tower defense game EVER. They just released a couple of final new levels plus a HARD mode that is supposed to keep us all busy until their new game comes out, Kingdom Rush: Frontiers. I don't know how I am going to wait.

4. Handy graphs are handy. I'm obsessively tracking my sleep patterns on my new UP band from Jawbone. I got one of these as part of my TED Live membership this year (thank you, Jawbone). And I am obsessed with my sleep patterns. First of all - how does it know?! Second - some days, I am a terrible sleeper. I also track steps and yoga workouts in here. You can put in your mood (which I do occasionally) and your food (which is a huge pain in the ass from an interface point of view). But the sleep and movement tracking is very interesting.

5. Planning for the future. I spent a lot of time recently cleaning out my bookshelves, sorting books for our Little Free Library (more about that in a future post) and then finally getting all the boardgames I pledged on Kickstarter onto the empty shelves (instead of in the middle of the floor of the office). Then I went to YouTube and found tutorial/review videos of all of them. And then I put all those in a playlist. So now, when friends come over (Doran!) and ask "how do you play this game" (one that I haven't even opened yet), I can pull up the video on my Apple TV.

And that's why I didn't write a blog post this week.

Do You Own Your Social Media Initiatives?

It's been a few weeks since there was a great disturbance in the force: Yahoo announced internally that Delicious, the popular bookmarking service that I've been using since 2005, is a service in the "sunset" of it's life with Yahoo. And of course, the news was leaked and we all went ape shit.

Delicious has since responded on their blog that they are not immediately shutting down the service, but the announcement certainly got a lot of people thinking about where their content lives and what the longevity of those platforms is likely to be.

It's a question to ask about your overall social media initiatives. Sure, right now it may seem impossible that Facebook would ever go away. Or Twitter. But we've all heard "too big to fail" before.

If you didn't have Twitter and Facebook, would you have a social media strategy?

This is why it is so important for businesses to own the platform that is the focal point of their social media strategy.

I'm not saying don't have a Facebook page or don't run a contest on Twitter or don't experiment with new social media. Your customers are there right now, using these services.  You should be there too.  Listening and engaging.

But what happens when Facebook isn't all the rage. And Quora has lost its appeal. And gloofr is where all the kids are hanging out now? How much will you have to scramble to re-establish a presence with solid content and knowledgable community managers?

Here's what you can do to get a start on owning your own social media platform:

1. Start a blog. I know it sounds cliche. But there are a b'zillion reasons to blog (not the least of which Seth Godin says you should).

2. Put that blog on YOUR URL. I simply can't stress this enough. Why would you want your corporate/professional brand be associated with someone else? yourco.blogspot.com is not as professional as blog.yourco.com  And to the whole point of this article - what happens when Blogspot (or Typepad or Wordpress) goes away?  Even if your blog RUNS on one of those platforms, by owing your own blog/social media URL, you could migrate it to another platform if you wanted/needed to.

3. Use that blog as the starting point for your corporate social media hub. What's a social media hub? Dave Fleet offers a great diagram and model for understanding the place of a social media hub within your larger online presence.

A number of companies offer good examples of using their blog as a start for their social media hub - Whole Foods comes to mind.  Other organizations have taken it a step further - including their blogs and other social media profiles into one large hub.  Possibly the best example I've seen is Doubletree Destinations (Pizza Hut and H&M are also doing some interesting things in this area).

How are you mitigating risk vis a vis your social media presence potentially being owned by someone else and possibly going away? Or do you think this isn't really a risk - Facebook go braugh and all that? 

Recommitting to Blogging

I suck at blogging. I have for the last year, maybe even longer. And that really bugs me. I love blogging. So I am confessing my sins and recommitting myself. But I know that to be successful you need a plan. I tell clients all the time that an editorial calendar will ease their blogging pain and help them keep on track to their blogging goals. Why don't I simply take my own advice and create an editorial calendar?

I have two inspirations for my 2011 editorial calendar. The first is one that has actually stuck with me for years - Mike Stansone's Sansone's post about editorial calendars. His post is so simple and straightforward; I've thought about it often over the last few years.  It's a perfect model for an easy, breezy blog editorial calendar.

My other inspiration is a recent post from Gretchen Rubin (of the Happiness Project) who discussed choosing a one-word theme to "set the tone" for 2011. I decided to adopt this approach for my blog's editorial calendar. The one word gives me a consistent prompt but also allows me a fair bit of freedom.

So, here is my 2011 editorial calendar:

Monday = Inspire
Inspire encourages me to start the week off right. Also, I intend for this to be primarily visual (so an image or a video) though there is certainly room for an inspiring quotation or idea.

Tuesday = Advise
The main reason I started MNIK was to share ideas about digital marketing and social media.  We did a lot of interesting work last year and I'm about to start teaching my third class on social media at UBC - I certainly don't have a lack of war stories or insights about online marketing or best practices in social media. This is a day to get back to basics and what this blog is supposed to be about.

Wednesday = Shill
Some of what I blog about are product reviews. Sometimes technical products, sometimes books. Sometimes I've been asked to participate in a blogger outreach program. Or sometimes I want to (explicitly) promote my own clients or my own projects. So Wednesday is shill day - the day I'm not blogging for purely altruistic reasons ;)

Thursday = Geek
I am a geek at heart. Not just a technical geek (though certainly that) but also a word geek, a wine geek, a cooking geek. So expect some kind of technical tip or "how to" or app review or extreme geek piece on the origins of the word "kitty-corner". This might also be the day for infographics.

Friday = Discover
This is the day to share the new: a new blog, the day for my book summaries from my 2011 reading project, a new website. I also have an interview series I'm planning to start - this would be the day I share those as well.

I'm not planning on blogging on weekends.

This is my blogging plan for 2011. What do you think - doable? Are you recommitting to blogging or podcasting or some other form of online expression?

Photo Credit: keso

More on Choosing a Blogging Platform plus a Serendipitous Lesson about Graphs

Following on my post yesterday about choosing a blogging platform for small and medium businesses, Catherine Winters asked if I had any market share data about the different platforms.  Good question.  So I did a little searching and Señor Google did have a few interesting things to say ...

First, I liked this piece by Pingdom on the blogging platform of choice for the Top 100 blogs.  About 2/3 of them use a self-hosted service - so those aren't really relevant.  But a 1/3 or so use a hosted platform and it was interesting to see those results.

 

I liked the Pingdom piece (even if the data is from Jan 2009) because it included only "real" blogs - there are a lot of spam blogs out there.  This is what concerns me a little about the report from BuiltWith (a site I totally didn't know about that tracks technology changes and trends).  It looks at the whole universe of blogs and I feel fairly certain that a large number of them are spam.

Wordpress is certainly the most popular - especially in articles about which blogging platforms are the most popular :)  There are a lot of those articles out there.  This one from Fuel Your Writing was the best written one I found.  While he doesn't quote market share stats, David selected four platforms that he was familiar with (Wordpress, Blogger, Tumblr and Posterous) and shared his well-thought-out pros and cons.  I only wish he would have included Typepad since it would have rounded out my recommendation list nicely. 

David comes to one of the same conclusions that I did - you need to choose your platform based on your needs - which is why I was trying not to focus on "feature set" in my blogging platform recommendations, but on other "meta" issues around blogging.

Oh ... here's the other neat piece I discovered.  ProBlogger has done a survey of the blogging platforms used by his readers for the last few years. Great data - again, Wordpress on top.  What I was delighted to discover what this companion piece by Jon Peltier where he uses ProBlogger's data to improve the graphs used to visualize the data.  If you're interested at all in data visualizations and how to use graphs to improve your content, read Peltier's piece - I love how step-by-step and clear it is.

And I'm still looking for any "meta" criteria (vs features) that you would add to my list when choosing a blogging platform.

What To Look for in a Blogging Platform

Update: I've written a companion post about some of the market share info I found about blogging platforms as well as a bit about data visualization.

I'm teaching a class this fall at UBC on Social Media Fundamentals.  Very excited about it!  One of the areas we're covering is, as you would expect, blogging.  I wanted to put together a little comparison table to help people choose a blogging platform.  I'm making some assumptions: that the platform will be hosted (no Wordpress self-installs) and that the people who will be managing the blog are not super-technical.

So, I put together a list of criteria.  It includes:

• Cost (both initial and "add-ons")
• Allows a unique domain name
• Is there a theme library and/or a template designer
• Easy to Use for Non-technical users (1=easy; 5=hard)
• Allows you to export your content
• Analytics options

If you were a small or medium business owner, what else would be important for you to know.  I'm not doing a feature by feature comparison because I don't think it's necessary.  Most of the features are similar (e.g. offering both "pages" and posts) - to me, the true difference comes down to how intuitive and "friendly" the interface is.

Am I missing anything really important?

The blog platforms I'm including are:

• Typepad
• Wordpress
• Blogger
• Tumblr
• Posterous

I've embedded the doc below (or follow the link) if you want to take a look. And I realise that the 4th criteria (easy to use) is completely arbitrary. So you Wordpress fans - don't jump on my case. My experience of Wordpress isn't delightful. And, I recognize that I have a bias towards Typepad since I've been using it for 5 years. I promise I will disclose all my biases to my class :)

"Serious bloggers" run ads

I use Typepad as my blogging platform. I've been using it for four years now. For the most part, I've been pleased with the improvements they have made to the service over the time I've been a customer. And I think they try to add value beyond the blogging platform itself by activities such as hosting free webinars and starting an ad program for Typepad bloggers.

It's their push on advertising that caught my attention. I saw this little graphic on my dashboard the other day.

[If you have your graphics turned off, it reads "Are you a serious blogger? Prove it. Put ads on your blog to get paid for your hard work and give it a more professional look."]

Are ads on a blog the hallmark of a "professional look"?

We run ads on OneDegree.ca - because that is a for-profit venture. I also run ads on funchico.com - some Google AdSense and some affiliate banners. I also have some on our Gay Wedding site (to try to recoup some of our wedding costs ;) .

There was a time I had ads on here on MNIK. Mainly for a lark. I never thought they would earn serious money (funchico and the wedding site combined have earned 77 cents this year through Google AdSense). And I had no real control over them (or possibly just no idea on how to place them well). So I took them off.

But the idea that they (or any ads) would make my site look more professional never occurred to me.

Rob recently added AdSense ads to his blog  - in order to experiment with them. And Darren added AdSense ads a while ago, to his sub-pages and his "project sites".  Neither of them used the argument that they wanted their sites to appear "more professional".

Are ads the hallmark of blogger professionalism? Do ads a "serious blogger" make?

After I started this post, I saw this new graphic also touting their advertising program ...

It's kinda funny.  But also seems to go against the principles of The Generous Web and Whuffie that are the backbone of so much of what is good that happens in the blogosphere.  Now, I certainly think that bloggers should  make money from their blogs.  I guess I just find this particular ad so ... icky.  Just me?

Regardless, I am still very interested by the assumption raised by the first Typepad tout - do ads on your blog make you look more professional?

New blog design on MNIK

September is really the new year for me - not January. Perhaps it's too many years of purchasing school supplies (mmmm ... shiny new binders). So, when I wanted to refresh my blog, I decided to do it for the fall.

I am thrilled (THRILLED!!) that my friend, Shannon Chiarenza (she's @ShannonC73 on Twitter), did a custom illustrated header and footer for MNIK. Shannon is a triple threat - she does web design, is smart about the online space (her piece on why people won't follow you on Twitter is very popular) and is starting to focus more on illustration with an upcoming fall launch of a kid's book that she illustrated.

I wanted a different look than what I had before and the illustrated design that Shannon created is definitely different. I'm hoping it will inspire me to write more regularly.

So, if you're reading this in the feed or email, please take a swing by to see Shannon's great illustration!

Promoting Your Corporate Blog Offline

Disclosure: Petro-Canada is a client of mine.

When you have a corporate blog (or any blog, really), you want to find ways to regularly engage new readers.  And it is highly likely that some of those readers will be offline.  Consequently, I was quite pleased to see this recent development from the downstream corporate communications team over at Petro-Canada (now Suncor).  Petro-Canada used to have a decal on their gas station pumps very similar to this pie chart.

It certainly gives you the factual breakdown, but it certainly didn't encourage a conversation.  However, starting this summer, Petro-Canada changed the sticker quite radically.

Now they are using a decal shaped like a gas pump with a link to their blog PumpTalk.ca and an invitation to customers to  join the conversation.  You can see a picture of it to the right.

This is smart because you're alerting your customers to the conversation your hosting right when they care about your product. 

Now, I don't imagine anyone is whipping out their mobile device RIGHT THEN to read the blog and leave a comment.  But people are certainly passionate about gas prices.  And being alerted to there being a place to discuss gas prices is a good thing.

I would think the next step is to include that URL on gas credit card bills - to try to engage customers when they might actually be in front of a computer and would take the time.

Are there other examples you've seen of companies promoting their blogs offline?

Are trackbacks now the sole dominion of spammers?

I just spent 37 minutes turning off trackbacks on all my blog posts (if Typepad's post management tools were a little better, it would have taken me 37 seconds).  Lately I've been getting 2 or 3 trackbacks a day for various drugs - all of which have nothing to do with me or my blog posts.

I looked back over my 6 year blog history and counted my trackbacks: for 925 posts I have only 81 legitimate trackbacks - the most recent from mid-December of 2008.  Compare that to the 8,083 spam trackbacks trapped in my spam filter.

Ridiculous.

Seems that no one if really using them anymore - is that true?  I've decided to turn them off if for no other reason than to save myself the 2 mintes every other day to delete them.

Is it time to migrate towards a less proprietary and more social system of "trackbacks"? Something like CommentLuv?  I know WordPress has some nice plugins.

Or, with the advent of Twitter and the slow coming-of-age of Friendfeed, do we even need the trackback-esque mechanism anymore?  Seems like the conversations have migrated to other places.

Photo Credit: PrudenceBrown121

Canadian Blog Awards Round 1 Voting is Open

A bit late with this news - but Round 1 of Canadian blog awards voting is open til mid-day Nov 29th.  MyNameIsKate.ca has been nominated in "Professional/Career" category.  A vote is always appreciated!!

My lovely wife has been nominated in the "Personal Blog" category.

And OneDegree.ca has been nominated in the "Group Blog" category.

I'm so thankful to the team over at the CBA for all the hard work they put in!  Big kudos to them!  If you have a minute or two, check out the awards.  There are so many great Canadian bloggers - take a few moments to check out one or two you're not familiar with.  You'll be pleased with the talent you discover!

A quick shout out to Raul over at Hummingbird604 who put together a list of Vancouver bloggers who were nominated.