BLOG HISTORY
I started this blog in 2005 for a couple reasons. First, I was (and still am) eager to share my take on branding, marketing, and communications. Second, social media was just taking hold back then and more and more marketers were charting their travels on these new waters via their “weblogs.” So I dove in with both feet. Through the years my blogging has ebbed and followed usually inversely related to my work load. When I started I was working at other companies so the blog largely served as an escapist hobby and a place of developing my voice as a marketer.
Nearly four years ago, I began a new chapter as I joined my family’s advertising agency heading up new media ventures and our regional growth. In that early period there was very little blogging at all. But as you advise others on adopting new media it becomes very apparent how critical it is to lead by example. For any brand, especially a professional services firm, a blog is a critical marketing tool in positioning your expertise in relationship to key issues in the marketplace. It also follows a principle of Million Dollar Consultant Alan Weiss by “making it easy for people to get to know you” (“but expensive for you to get to know them” he goes on to say). Needless to say, blogging is a key tool in promoting one’s thought leadership.
Initially the strategy was for my blog — with fresh content ripe for those SEO spiders — to essentially eat our agency’s website. However, somewhere along the way I lost the voice of my blog. It became challenging to be bold and opinionated from within a site where I was also very actively (and logically) schilling for something. It also became dubious to critique brand communications in the zeitgeist on a site where I post work our firm does.
A NEW DIRECTION
After mulling this over for awhile and consulting blogging expert Mack Collier (you really should participate in #blogchat Sunday nights at 8 PM Central on Twitter) I decided to flip-flop and pull my personal blog back out of our company’s website (more changes coming there soon too). With this change comes some other changes as well as this blog shifts gears a bit …
BRAND-DRIVEN FOCUS
Increasingly the best blogs have a razor-sharp focus. Rather than waxing on a multitude of marketing issues with varying points of focus, my goal is to take the horizontal slice of branding and examine how this critical practice is still very much alive and well and critical to gaining public appeal regardless of what media the brand engagement occurs in. And it’s not just business brands. I subscribe to Patrick Hanlon’s definition that a brand is anything — person, business, place, etc. — seeking to gain public appeal. In Don Draper’s era a brand was defined by their most recent “big idea” campaign and how it was executed — usually via TV, radio, print, and maybe some outdoor. But nowadays, though brand engagement occurs across a wide array of paid, owned, and earned media platforms, the principles of building and propelling strong brands remain.
Many of you know I am something of a political junkie as well. Say what you will but more and more the tenants of branding are becoming a bigger part of how we select our leaders and make decisions on issues that effect the world live in. It truly is a brand-driven world. So I’m putting on my blinders and narrowing the focus of this blog to offer you my brand-driven insights on the world we live in.
CONSISTENCY IS STILL KING
Blogging best practices, like strong branding and email marketing, say that consistency is king. You need to make sure your new posts are a regular part of your reader’s routine. Above all, you need to find a schedule that works for you. If you set a goal that is too lofty (daily posts!) then you are bound to trip up which hurts your readers but also your consistency. Mack Collier also added at the Marketing Profs Digital Mixer last year – if you can do one post a week, do one post a week. If you can do once a month, then do that. But make it as consistent as you can. Pick a day — even a time of day — and set your schedule. Oddly enough, I’ve found myself giving this advise to others but I haven’t always followed it to the letter. One example of someone I’ve shared Mack’s advise on consistency with is Salesforce.com evangelist Mike Gerholdt who used it to package his Monday Morning Admin blog posts which eventually led to his successful Button Click Admin blog.
One brand-driven aside on blog posting consistency … While I firmly believe that consistency is king and leads to better bloggers and engaged readers, I don’t think you should throw the baby out with the bathwater. If publishing a post a week (or whatever you determine your schedule to be) is upset one week and you have a choice between publishing a sub-par post to meet your self-imposed schedule and waiting a day or two — I would say you wait a day or two and protect your blog’s brand integrity and quality.
For my part, I’m going to go with new posts once a week and right now Monday AM seems like a good day for the working world. A fresh new brand-driven insight to start your week and set your watch by. It’s also worth noting that this routine follows the maxim above as it works for me. I am the father of four and often spend weekends noodling around creating new posts on the iPad’s WordPress app while parenting and watching cartoons.
PLATFORM/PACKAGING
Another big change you’ll notice around my blog is my new theme and layout. When I started blogging I used Google’s Blogger and eventually made the fairly common migration to WordPress. I won’t go into all of the reasons why WordPress rocks, save one: anyone can use it. That’s why sometimes I’m amazed by how hard some make it. Some themes and frameworks are so complex that, to the non-coding blogger, you end up trapped — hidden from the very simplicity that makes WordPress king. The fact that if you can edit a Word doc, you can edit a WordPress blog. I am proud to say that my new theme is nothing more than WordPress’ off-the-shelf Twenty Ten tweaked and tricked out by the talented Jeff Hamlett.
To me, this is the best of both worlds, I have a theme that communicates who I am as a brand but also the freedom to do whatever I want in my sidebar via widgets, menus, etc. and it just works. Don’t let all of the theme frameworks, bells and whistles hide the true freedom that WordPress gives you — the blogger.
WHY AM I TELLING YOU ALL OF THIS?
While I’m not a rock star blogger (yet!) I do think there are probably quite a few bloggers like me out there. Given the fact that BlogPulse indexed over 126 million blogs in 2009, you have to assume that there is a bell curve at play here with a rather small percentage of that overall total being rock stars (Chris Brogan, Seth Godin) at one end while the other end is populated by those that gave up the practice after just a few posts. In the middle, one can assume that there are a sea of bloggers like me. Folks who have been at it for many years and sail on, navigating the ebbs and flows as best they can and shifting gears when the need arises for an occasional course correction. If I can keep just one of them from running ashore then this post has served it’s purpose. Blog on.
See you here Monday mornings for fresh brand-driven insights!
