Jan 1, 2008 | blog
Well, It’s time I talked about what I think is going to be growing trends in 2008. I’ve been amazed at the trends in 2007, with the rise of micro-blogging, Facebook, and other social-networking and social-media tools. Seeing the interest, functionality and participation in these tools, to me, fosters ideas of how they can be leveraged in the enterprise. It’s been a great ride, and I believe a lot of this will continue into 2008.
So here is what I think will be some of the trends and events in 2008.
- Social Network tools & platforms make inroads into the enterprise.
- Public micro-blogging tools continue their growth.
- The original “New Media” disrupter, the blog, re-emerges as the focal point of many individual and businesses.
- Personal Branding gains more mainstream understanding and acceptance
- Video becomes more prevalent as a social media tool for posting, sharing, micro-blogging, and more
- More, simple, social media tools (SocNets) become available for business or professional networking
- Microsoft and Apple continue to look more alike in their successes and failures.
- The use of “bite size” media becomes an easy to use building block for the average person
Well, that’s it for now – not a big list, and probably not many revelations there. It’s probably more indicative of what I’m looking for and focusing on for the next few months anyway. Cheers!
Dec 11, 2007 | blog
I want to thank Jeremiah Owyang for his Some Conversations have shifted to Twitter blog post earlier today. It gave literally hundreds of people the opportunity to find new people to interact with.
The post went up sometime before 10am (Central Time), and Jeremiah Tweeted about the post on Twitter shortly thereafter. Within just a few minutes, there were over 20 comments on this post with people giving feedback and sharing their Twitter profile links, inviting others to follow them and join in their conversation.
Within three hours the comment count had climbed to over 160 with more streaming in constantly. This desire to interact, to connect, share ideas, and communicate is nothing new, but what followed on Twitter is the bigger story.
We can talk numbers, and its at least someplace to start. For example I found nearly 100 new people to follow, and about 80 people have chosen to follow my Twitter postings. Fellow Twitters had similar experiences today and in some cases doubled their follower counts.
However, what’s at the root of this enormous expansion in Twitter following is the desire to build community. To interact with more people, from different places and expand our peer networks. The numbers are simply a statistic to track, but the real important part is that I was able to find 100 or more interesting, intelligent, fun people that I wanted to add to my daily or weekly conversations. I’m also flattered to have so many people interested in what I bring to the table as well.
The net result for the next few days will be learning how to deal with a fire hose of Twitters, a constant barrage of information. Currently I’m trying to read as much as possible as it passes by, but I’m quickly learning to skim and watch for the topics I should read and not absorb it all.
The post itself is a great piece about why Twitter is a useful tool, and should be read simply on it’s own. But I bet if you go read the post, the comments will pull you in and soon you too will be a part of the community-building exercise that has morphed out of a good blog post.
By the way, at the time of this writing, there were in excess of 300 commenter’s, sharing and building their communities. Are you?
Dec 11, 2007 | blog
Where did my social media efforts get off track? That is something that I’ve been trying to understand these last few months. Whether writers block, or busy with work, moving, family time, or whatever; I’ve lost track of what I was trying to accomplish in my social media efforts.
This is rather troubling to me since I seem to have lost focus somewhere back in September. I’ve rethought my topics time and again, got sidetracked reading the feeds I thought I enjoyed, and failing to use the time I did have available to me to good effect. The result is that I’ve floundered.
This post is not a declaration of a new direction, nor is it a launchpad of new resolutions to do better or post more, etc… It is, however, a post about how blogging can get away from you, and how social media can be a bit overwhelming without a least some kind of plan.
Now, the plan thing really starts to make more sense. While I’ve been blogging for awhile (three years this month), I really hadn’t had a clear focus on the why of it all. Because of that lack of definition, I’ve started and dropped several blogs. I currently have three, two of which are languishing in the dim corners of my mind crying out for content.
Without a plan, you may wander like I have from topic to topic, trying to find inspiration that would drive me to write more, share more and have fun doing it. Two of my blogs are on things that I’ve always been passionate about. Snowmobiling and mobile devices. But even that hasn’t helped me post on a regular basis or create media to support the blogs and make them interesting.
What I’ve found in the past year and a half (or so) is that I’ve become very interested in topics that I’ve no training in, no previous knowledge of. However, they have pushed me to grow in ways that I never thought of and for that I’m grateful. These topics are personal branding and social media.
So, I’m just going to “hunker down”, as it were, and keep working my way through to where I seemed to be.
Interesting aside when I was trying to wrap up this post. Jeremiah Owyang had a great post in Some Conversations have shifted to Twitter today. I wrote more on Twitter in 4 hours than I had in the whole month of November on all blogs and social sites combined. More on that topic later, but it demonstrates how one event can change things.
Nov 30, 2007 | blog
Well, after wondering for several weeks how to leverage the tagging feature of WordPress 2.3, I’ve finally started using it. It helped to learn that Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer was fully supported for tagging use in WordPress v2.3.1 release last month.
The trick for WLW, is to use the "keywords" field of the post entry properties (shown below). WordPress 2.3.1 will pick those keywords up as the tags for the post.
While this isn’t the exact integration I was thinking of, it certainly allows me to use the internal tagging features of WordPress and also let’s me set tags to Technorati (and others) as well.
So now you’ll find two kinds of tags on nearly all my posts. I’d love to know if this is worthwhile to anyone or if it’s overkill.
And speaking of tags, blogging pal Steven Hodson has a post on tags today as well – but from a different perspective. Worth a read.
Nov 27, 2007 | blog
So here I am, trying to write a post, pondering why anyone would be interested. It’s happened again, and not even a full month since I thought I was through one of my worst cases of writer’s block.
I’ve allowed myself to get distracted and loose focus on why I have been blogging. Of course I can explain a lot of reasons for this, the biggest one being a huge increase in work. You know, that deal that helps put food on the table.
However, I’d be remiss in simply using that as an excuse because it’s more than that. The worst part is that I’ve fallen into that trap of thinking that I’m not adding value. I’ve begun to debate with myself if the topics I always start to write are important to anyone else.
To anyone who’s blogged for awhile, you know these are the tell-tale signs of a number of things – not the least of which is simply procrastination. While I’ve been out reading a lot of blogs, feeds, twitter and such, I’ve not really participated to the level of my liking.
So this post is really just for me. It’s a warning sign to myself, to get me moving along and stop worrying about all the things we worry about when blogging. It’s like stage fright – I’ve literally been too concerned with feedback and I have no real reason for it. I’ve got several things running through me mind lately but haven’t made a real effort to blog about them.
