Lisa Barone may be my favorite blogger, so it was great finally getting a chance to hear her speak.

And we’re underway. Want to discuss the power of being strategically authentic instead of letting it all hang out.

Lisa Barone at BlogWorld

She’s the co-founder and Chief Branding Officer of Outspoken Media. Thinks of herself as a corporate blog voice-giver. That’s her passion, giving corporate blogs a voice.

“And as you probably know by now, I stutter.”

The fact that I stutter probably means that I understand the power of voice more than anyone else. I know what it’s like not to have one, I know what it’s like to have it taken away, I know what it’s like to have something to say and no way to say it, and I know what it’s like to get your voice back.

People say that you need to be authentic, show your customers who you are. All the different parts of your personality. You have to let people know everything about yourself. I’m here to tell you that’s a lie.

Problems with full authenticity

Audiences will only remember a few things about you. Giving too much dilutes your brand.

As bloggers, full transparency makes us look crazy.

The idea of authenticity leads us to whine and complain online and look bad.

Some negative examples

National Post reporter contacted somebody for a story. The person took 2 days to get back to him. Reporter was offended and insulted the contact. Contact wrote a nasty Tweet. Nasty phone call followed by nasty tweet followed by flame war. It was embarrassing for both of them. The paper had to issue an apology.

Tom Cruise jumping the couch. Went from beloved leading man to raving lunatic because he told us how much he loved somebody.

Too much irrelevant information distracts people from their core goal and threatens the band they’re trying to build.

The audience doesn’t want the real you, they want your blogging superhero.

Your blogging superhero

The marketing version of you. Using yourself to show people their desired outcome.

Magnify your strengths and marketable traits.

Forces you to identify your strengths.

Create a marketing strategy and editorial guidelines for your brand. Stop winging it to create a more unified, focus voice.

The internet isn’t always the friendliest place to be. There are people who want nothing more than to pee in your Cheerios (OK). Creating your superhero gives you the distance you need to not take these things to heart.

Wait – isn’t this inauthentic?

People are afraid that this will make them see inauthentic. Seth Godin says that authenticity in marketing is telling a story people want to hear.

We do this all the time. When you’re home with the kids you may be softer. When you’re out with the guys you may be louder. It’s not being inauthentic.

So how do you do it?

Steve Jobs told Apple that we live in a busy market. To be remembered you need to be clear about what you want people to know. Identify your place in the market. What 3 things do you want people to associate with your brand? Once you know them, right them down.

Build a story that brings it together. I told you about my strengths and weaknesses, I told you why that’s great for you, and then I told my story to bring it all together.

Lose everything that doesn’t relate back to what you want to show. It’s a distraction.

Like a job interview

Think of it like a job interview. You’re going to tell people about all the things you want them to hear, not about that bad relationship you had in high school. You’re not going to tell them that you just had a fight with your best friend.

A few years ago I took belly dancing lessons. I loved it because the teacher only taught beginner belly dancing because that’s what she wanted to be known for. She’d show up in neon unitards. When she described a move she was crass and vulgar. I doubt she’s like that in real life. I doubt she dresses or talks like that. But it worked for the class. [In that blog post Lisa foreshadows part of this talk, except she calls it "Be the best version of yourself." This talk takes it one step further, it's "Be the best version of yourself for the specific context."]

Takeaways

Your blogging superhero is the best version of yourself.

Allows you to hone in on your marketing strategy, heighten your personality, and connect with your readers.

Will keep you safe when things get rough.

We fall in love with people who are brave enough to be special and memorable.

Base your character on the best parts of yourself.

—

She ends with “I stuttered less than I expected, so we have plenty of time for Q&A.”

All the questions seem to start with “I really enjoy your blog.”

Some points from her Q&A:

• If you wouldn’t let some intern answer your phones, don’t let them Tweet for you.
• Define who you want to be in your market. The quick witted know-it-all? Super-helpful? Identify who you want to be. If your best friend had to pick 5 words to define you or your business, what would it be.

Also see Peter Shankman Rocks BlogWorld, Darren Rowse: Blogging from the Heart but Smart and Best of BlogWorld.

I’ve been enjoying ProBlogger for a while so it was great to hear him in person at BlogWorld. Here’s the essence of his talk.

Darren Rowse at BlogWorld 2011 LA

I’d like to start with an experiment. Find a person next to you that you don’t know and ask them why they started blogging. [Think about your answer, I'll wait.] I asked this on Google Plus. At the beginning most people said something about “I had something I needed to say” or “I wanted to engage people” or “I wanted to help.”

Then some brave soul finally said “I heard you could make money blogging.”

And then other people started saying things like that. Not just making money directly, but raise my profile, get a job, make a book deal.

Many of the earlier bloggers had noble reasons about wanting to share. Many people who joined later were more profit oriented. And some of the old-timers resent the newcomers, but I don’t, these are all good reasons to blog.

Somebody, let’s call her Sally, wrote to me saying “I heard that if you just blog from the heart things will work out. So I’ve been pouring my heart out, helping people but nothing has worked out for me, and I can’t keep doing this with no return.”

It does happen to some people. [And because of Survivors' Bias, those people often loudly repeat the "it will work itself out" canard and implicitly if it's not working out for you you're not really blogging from the heart. I'm glad Darren isn't spouting that line.] But for most people just blogging from the heart isn’t enough.

And on the other extreme I got approached from somebody I’ll call Harry. “I’ve been following the formula and it just doesn’t work.” “What formula,” I asked. He had subscribed to some program that said something like regular content + link building + comments + nice design + ads in good places + affiliate links = large profits.

“Can I look at your blog?” I asked.

“Sure, I’ll send you links to all 15 of them.”

And he’s really writing on 15 blogs every day. But when I read them, it looked like they’d been written by a robot. It was so formulaic and strategic that there was no heart in it.

I started as a heart blogger, but I couldn’t sustain it. It was taking me away from my family, and from commercial opportunities, and it wasn’t making me any money. In fact, it was costing me money.

Then things started working. Once I had 30 blogs going. But I didn’t care enough about the 30 things.

So let’s talk about When Harry Met Sally [I guess I should have seen that one coming. Any of you readers see that coming? Be honest]. Where the Heart and the Smart Come Together. There’s nothing wrong with Strategic Blogging and nothing wrong with Heart Blogging. But ideally you combine them.

Robert Frost wrote “There’s no tears in the writer, there’s no tears in the reader. If there’s no surprise in the write, there’s no surprise in the reader.”

You need to be engaged in the topic.

Tell stories. The posts that people remember are usually stories. They don’t remember what I told them about shutter speed. They do remember “Why this photographer is better than me.” A post about how I was smugly observing this silly woman with a camera at a George Michael concert. She held the camera over her head and took pictures with the flash and then looked and saw just black. She tried looking through the lens and only managed to get pictures of the guy in front of her’s bald spot. But as I laughed smugly she just kept experimenting, learning, taking pictures, and having fun. I realized she was a better photographer than I was, for three reasons. She had her camera with her. She was using it and enjoying it. And she was learning.

My most read post this year is a guest post of How to quit your job, move to paradise, and get paid to change the world.

Build community. People don’t come on line just to get information, they want to engage, they want to belong to something.

Inspire people. I don’t know about you but my life isn’t always that inspiring.

Inspiration was driving readers to information. Put up 15 inspiring photos. People e-mailed him asking for the techniques. Now these posts link to a tutorial. People click on those links like crazy.

Be personal.

Be playful. Be yourself.

I write best in a conversational style. My best posts often start as e-mails. Then I realize I can just remove the other person’s name and it’s a great post that people connect to.

Do Good.

Blogging Smart

If you want your blog to be a business someday, then start treating your blog as a business today. If you want your blog to eventually be something else, start focusing on that today.

After humoring my blogging habit for years, my wife gave me 6 months to get blogging working. That day I started calling advertisers. Finally got one, for $30 a month. Then I needed to figure out how to increase my traffic.

Define what success looks like to you.

I put together a 5 year plan. I recently found it. I was surprised by how much my accomplishments matched my plan. Articulating what I wanted to achieve helped me achieve them. Then I made a 1 year plan, which included what am I going to do in the next 30 days.

Know your reader. Create user personas. Creating a user profile gives me content ideas, marketing ideas, and monetization ideas. It tells me how to engage him. Knowing who you want to reach will transform how you blog. If you already have readers, great, it can help you figure out who you should be reaching.

Branding.

Jeff Bezos says a brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.

So what do you want people to say about you. If you spend 15 minutes thinking about that it will help you.

Marketing: Build it and they will come? No, they won’t.

So another exercise: Where are your potential readers gathering? How can you participate there?

Hooks. Think through how do I get a first time visitor to become an evangelist for my site.

Create something to sell.

Editorial Strategy. What type of post should I be writing for my blog? I write to serve my current reader. And some posts I write to get shared. Some posts are to inform, some to interact, some to inspire. Mix it up. The more you think about this the better. Also think about frequency. Do some testing, and look what your competition is doing.

Experiment, test, and tweak. Did 31 days to a better blog. Did OK. Second year did it better. 3^rd year did it again, this time with an e-mail list and a daily reminder, a forum. People asked for an eBook. I said, OK, I can gather it into an eBook and sell you that. We’ve sold around 300,000 eBooks from that random idea that I tweaked and experimented on. It’s now gone through 5 iterations. So if something works, make it work better.

—–

Great session. And give the man credit, during the half hour I took finishing up this post Darren was patiently talking to everybody that came up to talk to him, and is now talking to the people who stayed in the room.

For more BlogWorld coverage see Peter Shankman Rocks BlogWorld and Best of BlogWorld.

BlogWorld was awesome. Here’s the best of the best:

Best Lines

Amber Naslund:

• There are these big changes going on in how people interact, and we’re in charge. Are your parents scared? They should be.
• Our top fear isn’t failure, it’s being blamed.
• … they’d stone me to death. And not in the good way.

Mari Smith: I’m a raging extrovert. I often don’t know what I’m thinking until after I say it.

Debba Haupert : If you haven’t failed in Social Media, you haven’t tried Social Media. Start conversations, see what gets people to talk.

Darren Rowse:

• When people come up to me to mention a blog post that they remember, it’s never a post about shutter speed. It’s always a story that I told.
• Sometimes you can inspire people first and then inform them. I posted a slide show of inspirational pictures, and then a link to a tutorial about techniques. People clicked those links like crazy.

Peter Shankman:

• I have not only ADHD but also ADOS. ADOS is Attention Deficit [gets distracted and points to imaginary object] Oh, Shiny.
• To let you know how good I am at Iron Man the really top people are sponsored by great health-oriented brands. I’m sponsored by candy companies.
• Ed Meese said MTV is killing America because it’s cutting their attention span to 3 minutes. Today I’d kill for an audience with a 3 minute attention span. Average attention span today is 2.6 to 3 seconds. Roughly 140 characters.

Guy Kawasaki:

• I only have 2 modes on social. Off or on. If I have something to share, I put it out to 275,000 of my closest friends. [Back in 1999 Guy liked our product, GuruNet, and said he’d send out an e-mail to his “5,000 closest friends.” We laughed about him having such a large following. The number 275,000 today surprises us a lot less than 5,000 did 12 years. And that, in a nutshell, is the Social Media revolution.]
• I’m amazed that people are so skeptical about Google +. Especially the tech media, who are always saying things like “Sergey hasn’t posted a message in 36 minutes. They must have given up on Google +.”

Best Introductions:

• “Guy Kawasaki and Chris Brogan, two people who need no introduction.” Then she walked away. [Sadly the introducer also received no introduction so I don't have her name. If you have it, please let me know.]
• “Without further ado I’d like to introduce Mari Smith. Woo hoo!” [Mari Smith, introducing herself]

Best Anecdotes:

• Peter Shankman: I had 40 straight flights where I sat next to people who weighed 400 pounds or never showered. Then I sat next to Miss Texas. It was obviously her turn to have a shitty flight.
• Chris Brogan: When I was a teenager I saw Guy [Kawasaki] when he was evangelizing for the Mac. I told my dad “that’s what I want to do when I grow up.” Dad said “that’s the dumbest job idea I ever heard.”

Best Personal Touch:

• Lisa Barone: I think of myself as a corporate blog voice-giver. That’s my passion, giving corporate blogs a voice. As you probably know by now, I stutter. The fact that I stutter probably means that I understand the power of voice more than anyone else. I know what it’s like not to have one, I know what it’s like to have it taken away, I know what it’s like to have something to say and no way to say it, and I know what it’s like to get your voice back.
• Peter Shankman: Ends keynote by saying that if you’re doing it right, doing great work and living a great life are one and the same. And make sure to remember to live your life. Then shows a picture of himself proposing and announces his engagement.

Best Stats:

Best Running Gag:

Peter Shankman often stopping to translate for the under-30 crowd:

• Radio – that’s like Pandora before the internet
• Books – that’s like a Kindle that doesn’t use batteries
• Rolodex – that’s like Outlook but with cards

Also see: Best of SMX East 2011

SMX East was great. Here was the best of the best:

Best lines:

• Tom Petryshen: One of the best ways to motivate people is fear. But if you can’t do that you can try things like focus and discipline.
• Geoff Donaker (Yelp CEO): With whom do we compete? Everybody and nobody. Do we compete with Google? 4Square? Yeah, sure …
• Todd Friesen:
  • I liked the internet better when my idiot cousin didn’t know how to use it.
  • I have a friend who is experimenting with getting Mechanical Turk to do 500,000 queries to try to get terms to show up in Google Suggest. The results are iffy. (Responding to question: I’m afraid to type [My company] sucks into Google in case it sends them a signal. Reply was to not worry at all. But Danny said whenever he sees a result to his site he clicks on it, just in case). [Update: In 2011 Google began using (admitting they use?) user activity to influence rankings. This may have been a boon to Mechanical Turk and the SEOs who use it for gaming the system.]
• Max Thomas: We used to promote online reputation management. But we got too many customers that we didn’t want. Now we just offer reputation management as part of our overall service.
• Danny Sullivan:
  • I’ll take any questions you have. If they’re about search, all the better.
  • I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but there are some people who don’t like SEOs.
  • You have to understand that Lisa [Barone] is the determiner of what the best session is. When I go to a session and I don’t see Lisa liveblogging I think great, I’m sloppy seconds.
  • Don’t know if you all saw the MySpace movie this weekend (after asking a favor of MySpace’s Tony Adam) (the Facebook movie was just released).
  • I always felt Google was the Marsha Brady of search. Cause it was always Google Google Google. And Yahoo! was Jan saying what about me?
  • If I wanted to create a new search engine I would create a type of content that doesn’t exist and then provide a search engine for it. That’s happened twice: YouTube & Twitter.
  • To Google’s Jeremy Hylton: Can you give me a list of those ranking factors? Eric said it’s OK.
    • Jeremy replied via Twitter:  @GilR @dannysullivan i started writing a tweet that listed all of the ranking factors but then I ran out of characters. [Hmm ... Twitter isn't the perfect format for all documents. Who knew? Hey, we finally found a great use for Google Buzz!]
  • Google remembers. [Then as an afterthought] Bing too. Forgot you were here. [at panel with Google & Bing reps]
  • You all see the facebook movie yet? I hope I didn’t give anything away. He gets rich in the end.
  • A little known fact: TrustRank is named after a Google employee named Larry Trust [I had never realized that PageRank is named after Google co-founder Larry Page (according to Google]
• Bruce Clay: SEO is like trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube while juggling it.
• Kevin Ryan: That .25 seconds I saved from Google Instant really changed my life. (great laugh line. But if the average search is  really 2-5 seconds faster, as Google claims … well, that is huge)
• Stephan Spencer: I’m just going to get the Google Implant when that comes out (after being asked if he’s concerned about the Google monopoly)
• Maile Ohye: I’m just glad I have a day job (after explaining how she would optimize the Google Store if she were responsible for its SEO)
• Rae Hoffman: My biggest waste of time the past few years? Optimizing for Yahoo.

Best stats:

• Daniel Ruby: Google has 97% of mobile browser search traffic  (hat tip: Greg Sterling)
• Dennis Glavin: People expect to buy within an hour after using mobile. From a PC it’s 7 days. (hat tip Amber Mullin)
• Baris Gultekin: 55% of queries 3+ words, 70% have no exact match, 20% never seen before in past 90 days (hat tip: Danny Sullivan)
• Othar Hansson:
  • The probability you want YouTube when you type Y is insanely high (hat tip: Danny Sullivan)
  • Google Instant increases clicks on videos by 28%. (hat tip: James A Martin)
  • Typical users do <1 google search/day  (we are not our target audience) (hat tip: Dunrie Greiling)
• Tony Adam: MySpace reduced page load times and increased indexing from 5 million to 20 million (hat tip: Vanessa Fox)

Best points & insights:

• Steve Tullis (Bing): We use whatever information we have to try to make the results better. That includes click-thru rate on links, and actions in our browser or toolbar. (Google said they use CTR to analyze GUI changes, but didn’t say they use it for rankings) [Update: In 2011, Google ran a sting to show that Bing used the toolbar to see what Google results were being clicked on, allowing them to "steal" (?) some Google data].
• Marty Weintraub: Be a marketer first. Facebook is a channel, it’s not a strategy.
• Brian Cosgrove: URLs are your content NOT a reflection of your backend (discussing URL structure)
• Maile Ohye: Google recognizes that URLs whose only difference is parameter order are the same page
• Eric Papczun: (YouTube optimization): People don’t watch just one video. So get them to watch your next one. You can use annotations to link within YouTube, so the end of each video should have links to others.
• Othman Laraki (Twitter search): Traditional search is about routing (get to where you’re trying to go). Realtime search is about filtering.
• Rebecca Lieb: Is social the new search? Yes. [She started with a quote from a facebook VP and presented her study. I still beg to differ. My take is here: Google & the Facebook Fantasy. Also see Lisa Barone's review of the study Rebecca quoted]  … and the very next speaker:
• Kristjan Mar Hauksson: We did this study to prove that Twitter was fantastic at driving traffic to our news sites. Instead we found that it’s crap. The vast majority comes from Google.

Best interactions:

• Chris Sherman: Every year we say this is the year mobile is going to be big. Is it? [listens to all the panel's answers] So it’s no then. So I ask this question again next year. [Update: At SMX Toronto 2011 Chris finally said "Yes, this was the year that mobile became big."]
• Marty Weintraub: Wait, I need my coffee.
  • Elisabeth Osmeloski (moderating): Like you need more caffeine.
• Elisabeth Osmeloski: Changing your name in facebook gets problematic, like if you get married …
  • Greg Finn: So don’t get married.
  • Elisabeth: That’s totally what I was saying.
• Vanessa Fox: How many of you are having trouble with WiFi? [Nearly every hand goes up.] So a couple of you.
• Question: You said that the average e-commerce site loads in 2 seconds. Matt Cutts said that Google would penalize sites that loaded slowly. At what point would Google penalize a site?
  • Maile Ohye: 2.01 seconds. [She and Vanessa clarify: It’s not a penalty. It’s a very minor ranking factor that affects about 1% of the cases. And the users will be penalizing you for your slowness far more than Google does]
• Rich Skrenta: That SEO works is a fundamental flaw in ranking algorithm
  • Vanessa Fox (via Tweet): SEO is understanding the online space. Not a flaw. [Hey Vanessa, you should write a book about that]
• Matt McGee: Bruce Clay has been doing SEO for what …
  • Bruce Clay: 200 years
• Greg Boser: It’s rare that somebody putting bad links to you will hurt you
  • Jill Whalen: That’s why you keep a high quality link profile
  • Rae Hoffman: That’s why you never piss off an SEO
  • Todd Friesen: Especially a black hat SEO

Best euphemisms:

• The Bing / Google duopoly. Uh, yeah, duopoly, that’s what we have. That was part of the session title, but the conversation quickly got to the Google Monopoly and whether or not the government should intervene. Consensus was NO.

Best studies:

• Meredith Ringel Morris: A Comparison of Information Seeking Using Search Engines and Social Networks and What Do People Ask Their Social Networks, and Why? Wow, thanx Meredith & Microsoft.

Best ideas:

• Gregg Finn: Donate $1 to a charity for every comment on a facebook post. People have to become fans first.

Best anecdotes:

• Tom Petryshen: Client decided they would worry about the users first and the search engines later. Went from 100,000 pages indexed to 10,000. Then Google added 80,000 bad ones. The Google bot started shopping and adding items to Shopping Carts and Wish Lists and indexing those.
• Danny Sullivan: Googled a police station. Called the number there. Got the jail. They said they know Google has the wrong number. Danny said he knew people and could help them fix it. It was ridiculously hard to get Google to fix the info and get the correct number for the police station.

Best Tweets:

• @ShielaS: I refuse to SEO my damned tweets. :) RT @LivLarge: A tweet’s first 42 characters determines the title tag in google
• @ThomCraver: Day 3 at #smx East is the best all week and some of the best content in years! Where Are the Links #3a2, best EVER [OK, maybe I'm biased on this one]

Best blog coverage:

• Outspoken Media: SMX East 2010
• Search Engine Round Table: SMX East
• Austin & Williams: SMX East Day 1 Recap, SMX East – Day 2 Recap, Final Day at SMX-East – Day 3 and Overall Recap

Did you catch something great that I missed? Did I mention you and not link to you? Leave a comment here or Tweet to @GilR.

Also in this series:

• Best of SMX Advanced 2010
• Best of WordCamp Jerusalem
• Best of 140: Twitter in Tel Aviv
• Best of SMX Toronto 2010
• Best of SphinnCon 2010
• Best of BirdBrain 2010
• Best of SMX Advanced 2009
• Best of PubCon 2009

WordCamp Jerusalem had a very strong finish. Here’s the best of the best:

WordCamp Jerusalem

Best Lines:

• Matt Mullenweg:
  • People have better things 2 do. The tool should be invisible. Take 1 sec from 15 mil users. That’s a lot of time.
  • (Discussing WordPress history): Some of the conversations were a bit combative. But you guys should be fine with that.
  • 3.0 was just meant to be the version after 2.9. It wasn’t meant to signify a major release. [and in response to laughter:] Really!
  • Joel Spolsky said it takes 10 years to make great software. WordPress is 8. So we’re almost there!
  • I don’t mind being on the Titanic, but I want to be steering.
• Liz Cohen: Don’t go to blog angry
• Audience member after attempts to get reasonable lighting failed: “This is a tech college, everything is binary. It’s on or off.”

Best Lessons:

• Barry Abrahamson: 80% of total load time is client side. Tools: Yslow; Pagespeed. To reduce client-side load time Reduce # of http requests; compress (gzip); optimize images (resize, pngcrush, jpegtrans) [hat tip: Charlie Kalech]
• Barry Abrahamson: Don’t optimize if you don’t have to. Caching can cause complications and often doesn’t help much. Only use it if you need it. [hat tip: Charlie Kalech]
• Liz Cohen: Step outside your zone. Show that you’re thinking about the whole industry. Example RapidFire Video.

Best Interactions:

• Barak Danin: Got timid applause as he was introduced. Said “it’s OK” and helped start the clapping. “It’s just that I saw people were a bit embarrassed, so I figured I’d help them.”
• Matt Mullenweg reacting to positive audience participation enthusiastically shouts ”Free blogs for all of you”
• Audience Member: What would you tell somebody who started a site in WordPress? Matt: Well first, you made the right choice. Second, you’re in the right place. Should we take a survey in this room?

Best Tweets:

• @frgdr: #BestOf #KvetchingAsSport RT @mdavep #wcjeru not enough tuna in my tuna sandwich
• @mdavep: man, @photomatt is recklessly giving away free blogs left and right at #wcjeru

Best Stories:

• Matt Mullenweg: The way people became core developers at WordPress was they kept sending me patches and asking me to commit them. Eventually I had to say “here, have commit rights.”

Best Speakers:

• Matt Mullenweg
• Barry Abrahamson
• Liz Cohen (yes, I’m biased, but still …)
• Oren Yomtov
• Miriam Schwab
• Eyal Sela
• Jonathan Caras

Best Blog Coverage:

• Jennifer: Good Morning From WordCamp Jerusalem (Almost)

Did you catch something great that I missed? Did I mention you and not link to you? Leave a comment here or Tweet to @GilR.

Also in this series:

• Best of SMX Advanced 2010
• Best of 140: Twitter in Tel Aviv
• Best of SMX Toronto 2010
• Best of SphinnCon 2010
• Best of BirdBrain 2010
• Best of SMX Advanced 2009
• Best of PubCon 2009

I’m excited that I’m going to hear Liz Cohen discuss corporate blogging at Word Camp Jerusalem this Sunday. Liz runs Answers.com’s blog, no.stupid.answers.

Liz Cohen

A corporate blog lets you connect people with your vision of your company. Through no.stupid.answers Liz and her colleagues connect with the Answers.com community around a vision of building the world’s greatest collection of questions and answers.

The blog includes posts about:

• Community members, such as Kharrima is Still A-w-e-s-o-m-e!, Crystal McCann’s recent profile of Kharrima
• New Content, such as Pnina Baumgarten’s Time to learn Hinglish. And Rhyming Slang. And… about our new sources for Neologisms, Nutrition, biographies of contemporary musicians (from Abbato ZZ Top), Hinglish, and Rhyming Slang.
• Feature of the week, such as Video answers and new mobile community features
• Poetry Cafe, where Matthew Crowder coordinates poetry from our community, such as WorldWide520′s touching Why we wiki

The most important benefit from all this is to gather the community around a shared vision, working together to provide great answers. no.stupid.answers provides a face and a voice to the Answers.com mission.

Other corporate blogs that I love:

• Outspoken Media. I just really enjoy Lisa Barone’s writing. The primary purpose of her blog seems to be to get people to want to hire Outspoken Media when they’re looking to increase recognition of their brand. This is the normal model for a consulting agency writing a blog. If I were looking for branding help, they’d probably be the first company I’d turn to, solely because their blog connected me to their company and convinced me of their excellence. My favorite post from that blog: The 7 blog posts you shouldn’t publish.
• The search marketing industry has some excellent blogs including SEOmoz and SEO Book. In each case they’re always on-topic with great info, and they upsell to pro memberships for their tools. SEO Book has an excellent post today, How to Write Good. My favorite SEOmoz post was Jennifer Lopez’s SEO & The Princess Bride. But warning: the Princess Bride post got an unusually high number of down votes on SEOmoz. Part of many corporate blogs’ success is always staying on target and providing actionable information to their users. You may sometimes have trade-offs, in this case an entertaining but non-actionable post that helps some readers connect with you and your brand, but pisses others off.
• Rena Reich and Omer’s Scratching Post. My wife’s blogs connecting people to The Pet Wiki. The former is filled with actionable posts about setting up a Wiki. The latter is told from a cat’s perspective. Both help connect people with The Pet Wiki’s story, pet lovers sharing useful information. The former has the added advantage that if Rena ever starts accepting clients for MediaWiki consulting, the blog would help with that story as well. My favorites from each blog: Facebook Connect for MediaWiki and chilling with my babe.

Note that my blog is terrible as a corporate blog. It’s posts are never off-topic only because there is no established topic. It’s all the thoughts that I need to articulate and that I hope others find helpful. I hope it connects you to my story, and to Answers.com’s. My story? I’m fortunate to be helping great people do a great job.

What are your favorite corporate blogs? Why do you blog (or not blog)? I’d love to connect to your story too.

I started this blog a year ago today, on April Fool’s Day (by coincidence, I think), with a post on Managing Creativity. I published 70 posts last year, and when I reread them, I’m generally proud. Here’s what I learned this year:

Blogging

1. Join the conversation

The Good: This site’s 1st and 3rd most popular posts were full of praises: Best of PubCon 2009 and Best of SMX Advanced 2009.

The Bad: The 2nd and 4th most popular posts were angry rants: Why Derek Powazek’s Posts Were Reprehensible and Reality Check: Blodget’s Latest Calacanis Infomercial.

What the top 4 posts had in common? They were all linked to by prominent members of the SEO community. The top 3 were on events that SEOs were already discussing. The 4th was an analysis that sat virtually unread until Aaron Wall and Jason Calacanis started brawling on Twitter. I mentioned my post to Aaron, who linked to it in his subsequent article blasting Calacanis.

As 2009 came to a close, I counted down the 5 Best SEO smackdowns. This was an attempt to revive the year’s best SEO conversations and to get myself inside. 4 of these posts ranked in my top 20. The other ranked #49.

Your best way to get traffic and recognition is to get involved in a conversation.

2. Hit ‘em where they ain’t

This may sound like it contradicts the previous rule, but it’s better when you use these two rules together. I was going to live blog SMX Advanced. Then I saw Lisa Barone, Richard Baxter, and Angie Pascale were already doing it extremely well. I needed a Plan B. So I found something nobody was doing, writing a post highlighting the best moments of the conference, and these became my most popular posts.

An unexpected open area was when a rant I wrote about Toshiba’s “No Matter What” warranty. This warranty is only available in certain countries, and not in the US, UK, or Canada. Without competition from bloggers from these countries, that post received more search traffic than any other post on this site.

So find areas where there’s unmet demand, things that people want but other bloggers aren’t doing.

3. Nobody cares which posts are my favorites

I list my favorite posts in the top right of every page on the site. Here’s where the these posts rank among this site’s 70 posts:

• Humility: Recognizing Greatness Beyond Oneself: #18
• From the One to the Many: #48
• In Defense of Negative Thinking: #53
• Performance Evaluations: 5 Do’s and Don’ts: #5 (almost all from search traffic)
• The Onion, Star Trek, and Communities: #58
• Technology & Nostalgia, Progress & Values: #69
• When Work Works: #57
• Know Thy Weaknesses: #37

People aren’t looking for my opinion of which content they should read. Also, as I’ve noticed elsewhere, people are fairly blind to elements in the right rail.

4. Write for others

This post started as “Reviewing the First Year of Managing Greatness.” Interesting to me, but probably not to anybody else. I changed the title to “Lessons from my first year blogging” and I tried to focus the post on what other people can learn from my experiences.

So start with your own experiences, but try to focus on the person trying to apply your lessons to their reality.

5. Write for yourself

There are many reasons I blog, but the most important is to get all the half-baked thoughts, ideas, and emotions onto the computer screen. Saves my friends and colleagues from having to hear my half-thoughts, unless they want to. Articulating my thoughts and feelings brings them from half-conscious vibes into the light where they can be explored, enhanced, and quite often rejected. I wonder if there’s software that tells you what percentage of the words you type get deleted. In my case, the number is probably quite high, which is one reason each post takes me so long.

Blogging really helps develop my thoughts, recognize my feelings, and clear my mind. And while it’s thus intensely personal, it’s also a forum where I really hope to connect to others. Somehow talking to others from the privacy of my own keyboard allows me far greater liberty and openness than any other form of interaction or self-reflection. So thank you for listening. And I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Questions

Friends (if you’re reading this, that includes you), can you help me out with this? For my birthday, my wife bought me a consulting package from Beyond Blogging. Step 1 is “Finding your passion.” They write:

“It’s essential for long term success to find a topic that you’re passionate about. …

Here’s a quick test: If you could blog on any topic for the next five years, and be paid $100,000 to do it, what would you choose? …

Can you … work on this project ‘until your eyeballs bleed?’

[great bloggers have] a real passion about their topics and a desire to share their knowledge with the world.”

So where’s my passion? The best validation I’ve had for this blog are three particular friends who came up to me and told me how much they like reading my blog. Maybe they were just being polite, but I’m going to pursue this passion on the assumption that it’s more than that.

My passion is the search. The questions more than the answers, and the unknown more than the known. The perfect life for me is filled with awe and humility and constant searching and questioning. And my passion is to share that journey.

I don’t want a monologue, I want a conversation, with others who are moved by the same search.

The worlds of online search and Q&A will often be the concrete topics discussed. Also issues of leadership, quality content, and successful teams, communities and companies.

Which leads to another question. Should I move this blog from ManagingGreatness.com to GilReich.com? Or to somewhere else? The blog was originally going to be about management, but it’s been more about the search industry. I changed the tagline this morning to “searching and questioning, online and off”.

So I’m asking you for your thoughts. Does this blog need a more focused topic? Are you interested in carrying on a conversation on this blog? Does the theme of “searching and questioning, online and off” work? Is it time to move off of the current domain name? I appreciate your help.

Post Script (March 19, 2010): Well, one question that I’ve answered is that I’m sticking with “Managing Greatness.” Joel Spolsky wrote that a successful blog should be bigger than its author. The primary theme, expressed in the current tagline, is “Managing talent, encouraging greatness, and being your best.” I’m still searching and questioning. But I think the theme is helping each other become great.

Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/torley/ / CC BY-SA 2.0