Alphablogs

As you can see, our Alphablog media dog is learning fast! He’s been reading some Barrington Nevitt, an old colleague of Marshall McLuhan’s. (Yes, he can read. Why not?)

Friend of Alphablogs and one of Canada’s leading sommeliers, wine writer extraordinaire Mireille Sauve recently did a Taste BC guest blog post in Northwest Palate Magazine.

After her article was posted, she discussed with me some of the differences in the process of writing for blogs compared with writing articles for print. Whatever the differences may be, it’s clear that good writing transcends all supposed rules - bringing both the writer and the topic vividly to life in the reader’s mind. Here’s an example of Mireille’s approach in this excerpt describing only one of the wines featured in her Taste BC article:

Dunham and Froese Pinot Blanc. A full body is what struck me most about this wine, then it dawned on me: it tastes like Alsace! So rarely do we see good Alsatian Pinot Blanc in this neck of the woods that I nearly forgot what it tasted like–and here I was tasting a fine example, only it was from B.C! Excellent weight supported flavors of white peach and chalky flint with a charming white peppery spice at the finish. A mere $16cdn is what they were asking for this gem of a wine.

You can find out more on Mireille’s work as a wine industry consultant at her Wine Umbrella website.

Nettie: Your Emotional Blog Advisor

Dear Nettie,

I’ve been wanting to start a blog for a long time now, but I am afraid to post anything. I find I’m quite shy and don’t want to be criticized for it. The thing is, I do want to share my writing. How do I get over this feeling of inadequacy and fear of exposure?

Waiting to hear from you,
Shy One

Dear Shy One,

first of all, thanks for coming out of your shell long enough to ask this question.

I noticed you didn’t sign your real name (that wasn’t you, Jennifer, was it?) It looks like it was okay with you to write and sign as “Shy One.” That’s a good first step.

So let’s do a few more baby steps. Why don’t you go over to WordPress and get yourself a blog name. shyone.wordpress.com/ is taken already (although they only had enough stamina for two posts, I see) but how about iwontbeshyforever.wordpress.com – that one is still available. There ya go, all you have to do is click on that link. It doesn’t commit you to anything.

Then take some time playing around. You can set the privacy settings so that no-one can see your blog for now. It’s just you and your pet iguana.

Talking about which. If you think it’s going to take you a long time to come out of your shy privacy shell, why don’t you have your iguana do the blogging? Okay, not really but you could say it’s your iguana writing; dogs do it, why not pet iguanas? If you’re a budding writer, it might even be an interesting challenge to write from your pet’s point of view.

Of course you can just have an ordinary anonymous blog. Lots of people do that. This guy’s been at it for almost five years now; seems to work for him! If you want to remain anonymous then …. wait, that’s another post, I think someone else was asking about that. Stay tuned.

After you’ve played around a bit and made the decision to come out of your privacy shell you can start making a decision whether you’d like to out yourself on that blog. Or you can do what many others do and start a second blog that does bear your name.

Well, Shy One, I hope that helped. And if you want to get over your shyness in other areas of your life, not just blogging, check this out.

Nettie

If you have a burning question or concern, send it right over to Nettie using the simple form on our Just Ask Nettie! page, or add it to the comments section below.

(Iguana image by MrClean1982)

Hello everyone! Here we go – our Canada 9-5 blog carnival is officially in year two. Well, in calendar year two – but who’s counting!

Canada 9-5 is something we’re very excited about. What we have on offer here is once again the crème de la crème of Canadian business bloggers, people who use the power of blogging to showcase their professional and business expertise and to better get to know their customers and clients. We’re concentrating on non-IT bloggers; for IT people, blogging is second nature - it’s people whose business isn’t in IT already who, we think, need some help seeing the magic of blogging.

We even have a badge for it now (yup, we’re working on our blogging goals). I’ll let Carol have the word here for a sec, explain why we thought it would be important to do this:

We are really keen to see Canada 9-5 get going strong this year, and we’ve been calling 2008: The Year of the Business Blog.

Here’s our badge - feel free to use it to link back to us.

So here is our line-up for this month:

Small Business Owners - How tough to you want to get?
Our first article is by someone we already met – welcome back, Vahid! To Succeed As a Business Owner, You Have to Be Tough is a post on his blog, Work at Home Business Solutions. It talks about the drawbacks of being tough – burnout, for example – and how to deal with it.

Divorce Help - All the way from the East Coast to BC
Divorce Online is a good resource for people all over Canada who have decided they need to part ways with their spouses but want to go for an uncontested divorce. What I like about this blog is that it looks at both Federal and the various Provincial laws. Lately, they’ve had a few posts on spousal support – this one, for example.

Coaching - The poetry of search engine statistics
Lee Down is a coach here in Vancouver. His background is actually quite similar to mine – a quirky mix of IT, spirituality, community development, writing and human services. This post here about the deeper usefulness of search engine statistics shows his personality in a wonderful way. That’s exactly what blogs do – they help your clients get to know you better.

Fashion - Stories from a “petite activist”
Cynthia C is a writer and petite activist from Toronto. She has recently published her first book, Aspirations, which can be found online (Amazon, Chapters/Indigo, Borders, etc) and in bookstores everywhere. I have to confess, I’ve never heard of petite activists before – but it makes perfect sense! I have two friends who are very short and always complain of how difficult it is to find pants (and reach cupboards and find your friends in a mass of people when everyone is at least a foot taller and and and …)

Really enjoyed this article – I always find little historical bits like this one here fascinating:

The inventor of petite sizes, Hannah Troy, died almost 15 years ago at the age of 93. Mrs. Troy thought up the petite size when she noticed that many women were pulling on shoulders and waists, making them fit their figures properly. And yes, like many of us petites who know from experience, Mrs. Troy knew that alterations can “spoil the design.”

Community banking - What’s a blog bar?
Gene Blishen runs a small credit union; his blog is a bit about that and a bit about all kinds of things. He’s a great example of what we talked about in an earlier article, Blogging for business – letting your hair down. In the article we’re showcasing, Gene talks about the idea of consumers letting their hair down: In blog bars, customers (or clients, or consumers, whatever you want to call them) can let you know online right away what they think. These “blog bars” are installed on location. A very interesting idea – we’re coming full-circle: from online to on-site.

This concludes this edition of Canada 9-5. The next edition will come out on February 28. Got any articles to submit? If it’s a Canadian blog that talks about work or business, bring it on – here’s the submission form.

One of the reasons why people hesitate to start blogging, especially as businesspeople, is that they are nervous about having their privacy disturbed. That is completely understandable. Our lives are already so much more transparent, and while in some way that’s good, in other ways, it feels – and often is – invasive and unsafe.

The beauty of blogging, of course, is that it is a bit more casual, that it invites clients and potential business partners to get to know you a bit better.

How, then, can you let your hair down a bit and at the same time not violate your privacy?

One way is what I call a Blogging Privacy Strategy.

It is quite simple. Sit down and make a list of the non-business activities and topics that you often discuss with your friends and family. Can’t think of any? Just remember the last Thanksgiving Dinner with aunt Maude or when you went to a brunch and movie with the Jeffersons. What did you talk about?

Maybe the list looks like this:

• Hockey
• Stephen Harper
• Aunt Maude’s arthritis
• Your son Matt’s homework
• News and events in Aunt Maude’s hometown, Winnipeg

Now the question is – what aspects of these topics would you feel totally comfortable talking about? Which ones would be 100% off limits?

Let’s take Stephen Harper, our sometimes not-so-beloved prime minister. If you are now a staunch supporter of the Conservative party, maybe you feel quite private about that summer a few decades ago when you thought it would be cool to be a wild-eyed radical and had a shouting match with young Steve. And perhaps on the other hand, Stephen Harper’s economic strategies are something you’ll happily discuss with anyone who’ll stand still long enough.

Now you take another piece of paper and divide it into two columns: Absolutely yes, and Absolutely no.

Your wild-eyed past goes into the “Absolutely no” column and “Harper’s economics” goes into the “Absolutely yes” column.

And so you go down the list. Chances are you’ll have more than one “Absolutely yes” or “Absolutely no” per topic. Chances are also that as you do this, you’ll come up with more topics.

Within less than an hour, there you have it: Your Blogging Privacy Strategy.

Bonus? You’ll also have a nice big list of topics to write about.

(Photo courtesy of leep)

Are you writing your blog to reach a wide audience, or is your blog for a few select clients and friends?

Or in other words, are you looking for popularity and wide-reach, or in-depth one-on-one with your specific target group?

Both these approaches are valid in the blogosphere. Don’t assume that to be successful your blog has to reach a wide mass market. Isn’t blogging all about being outside of the mainstream media? Well, yes and no. More and more blogging is coming to the foreground as a viable medium in its own right, and, as dad always said, “With those rights come responsibilities.” Your responsibility is to your own audience, whether it is 24 close readers, or 2,000 mildly interested people, or 100,000 bots.

Have you seen that kind of devil-may-care stance that many bloggers affect or express becoming a little more mannered, as the audience widens? It becomes, in fact, the blog-style of choice. There is a blogger voice, a social attitude that many would-be bloggers might feel they have to emulate. Don’t. It isn’t necessary. If all the popular kids in high school do this or that, it doesn’t invalidate your particular voice or approach in any way. Once we get out of high school we realize this. There is no need to perpetuate the tyranny of social hierarchy and its many discontents through the blog world too.

Your blog is your own. Do what you like with it. If you are reaching out to a few select readers, in depth, speak directly to them. But if you are reaching out to the “masses” then by all means uses the blogger-voice, the wise-cracking bon mot, the shock factor, the now so-last-night Paris Hilton name-dropping, whatever it takes, right?

If you aren’t up for all that, just remember that reaching your client group through your blog can help them keep in touch with what you are up to, and it may not be really important for you to water down that message by adding references or keyword groupings that will up your google juice.

Now there some truly wonderful popular blogs out there too, and there are really good solid ways of building popularity and widening presence.

How do you want to interact - person to persons, or broadcaster to public? It’s all within your reach. Understanding media is all about understanding audience. If we want humans reading our blogs, we have to demonstrate some humanity to speak to humans. Then we can layer on the purpose of your blog, the intended people you wish to reach, the message you wish to give and the communication and community you want to build .

When using your blog for marketing and PR purposes, it’s vital that you turn on your visual thinking and come up with great ideas that can communicate energy around your project. Using a blog to promote your message and to connect to your current and potential community is now commonplace. But if you want people to talk about it, and spread the word, you need to make a visual impact.

How do you stand out from the crowd?

Here’s an example using a very simple project. Because it’s hypothetical, there are no photos for it. Let’s say you’ve self-published a recipe book, made up of recipes your family has loved for the past 20 years, with a few really old ones from your mother’s day. You want to use a blog to promote it beyond your close family, and to create strong visual meaning so people will remember it.

Number one: who loves your book the most? Your family, and possibly a few friends. How can they provide visual impact for your project? Simply by being photographed (in good light) laughing and enjoying one another’s company at the table. Pop it in the blog and voila!

Let’s say you connect with a worthy group or association, willing to support your efforts. If they were to have a fundraising dinner made entirely from your recipes (with participants receiving copies of your book) you would have plenty of opportunities for photos of a positive event to include in your blog - plus a link into a good cause as well. Or go for a school event, something other than family, where your recipe book can bring out the good times and good feelings in people. Again, document the whole process, not just the final meal.

Endorsements are standard workhorses of the photo-op, and if you do find a prominent person to endorse your recipe book, don’t think only of a text blurb. Try to get a photo of yourself and the endorser together, with the book, or perhaps sharing one of your cupcakes! Very blog-worthy indeed!

No external endorsement or organization? Use your extended network to get a couple of cooking teams together, to make your recipes, then celebrate by eating the results and reviewing the creations. All this can go into your blog. Be sure to photo-document the whole process of each team. You could even go so far as to select a couple of “judges” to determine who wins the “bake-off”!

One tip to remember: nothing looks less appetizing than food that has been badly photographed. If you don’t have access to great lighting and a good camera, stay focused on the interactions between people - go for the smiles and the good times rather than the plate of limp-looking yam fries.

Okay, that’s enough of the recipe book example. The main thing to remember is that everything you do in getting your project to fruition is bloggable. It is never too late to start. You can use the old documentary trick of “recreating” if you didn’t start out documenting your process. A picture is worth a thousand words, and a tagged picture can speak even louder.

And one more tip: Be yourself! It’s a lot more fun.

Josh Kenzer of Radical Behaviour has a fabulous post on blogging motivation. Here is an excerpt:

1. Job - When creating and maintaining a company blog, your are paid your regular pay to perform this task. However, I have seen many company blogs abandoned shortly after starting and this is for one of two reasons. First, the owner or someone high in the organization is the blogger. Second, the blog isn’t a company priority.
2. Revenue - If the blogger is receiving income from his blog directly, they are very motivated to keep blogging. For most, this isn’t enough revenue to quit their full time jobs, but it is enough to provide positive reinforcement. When the revenue doesn’t match the expectation, the blog becomes abandoned.
3. Passion - Enthusiast or hobbyist will often create blogs to showcase their passion. I have one that has been maintained for almost a year and a half now. The sustainability of these are based off two factors. First, is the blogger passionate about their topic that they can weather the initial months of talking to the wall. It can feel like an outsider trying to join a conversation that is already too full. Second, will the blogger receive positive reinforcement with others appreciating the contribution to the topic or will the blogger receive punishment which will then be associated to the hobby itself.
4. Voice - The blogger has something to say, and they want someone to read it. You can also call this ego blogging. This one is tough to sustain. In my opinion, most people overestimate how much they have to say.

Read here for the whole post.

Our job here is to help with number 2 – and I guess, with number 4; the two, in fact, are connected. A good blog has an authentic voice. Part of my personal passion is to help people articulate their voice. That sounds a little strange – but the truth is that just as with a singing voice, it also takes experience and skill and determination to develop a writing voice. And, let’s be clear, that voice can have a wide variety of tones, pitches and colour. “Authentic voice” does not mean you have to sound stiff or relaxed, casual or formal, intellectual or down-to-earth. It just means that you figure out

• what it is that you really think (and perhaps also feel) in the many roles you have in your life (business person, parent, friend, volunteer, etc.)
• which ones (one? all? some?) of these roles you want to give voice to; and
• let the words come out, without immediately censoring them. Let them come out on the paper/screen. You can always edit a bit afterwards. It’s the pre-editing – editing before you have something on paper/screen – that is so frustrating, and this frustration leads to loss of motivation.

Some people don’t have a problem with this. However, if you want to have a web presence and take advantage of the powerful tool that blogging is and you don’t have a lot of writing experience, you might be in a bit of a quandary. That’s where having some assistance with writing, at least for a little while, can be very helpful. Then, rather than abandoning your blog because it’s too hard slogging and because you don’t know how to let your voice shine, you can stay motivated to keep it going.

Wall Street Journal’s Happy Blogiversary article commemorates 10 years of blogging with brief blips of info from some a-list bloggers, and an interview with the creators of Blogger, among others. There’s an interesting slideshow of blog history, and the whole feature adds to the current ongoing chronicle of the mainstreaming of blogging.

The interview with the Blogger folks focused on the majority of their bloggers as individuals with only a few readers for their blogs, people wanting to post family photos and connect with only a few others. This is the general picture of the blogger, and one which has a definite place in the world of electronic communications, but it is only a small part of the picture. As Dave Watson pointed out in his recent Dot Comment article in the Georgia Straight, there is a wealth of useful niche-information out there, powered by passionate (dare I say obsessive?) people who blog directly and completely on their topics of interest.

The WSJ interviews also included a variety of known bloggers, each with their particular bent, all indicating the wider range that blogging now encompasses. Ultimately, blogging is here to stay, and is another aspect of the communication cornucopia (or is that dystopia?) in which we now function.

A friend sent me the WSJ link over the weekend, and I hesitated to link it to this posting as these things are often not available for long. Already the video component of the site has come down - but here’s a link to the text - try it and see if it still works.

(Aside: My friend had sent over this link because of my McLuhan interest. In the article, Tom Wolfe, blog curmudgeon, said: “One by one, Marshall McLuhan’s wackiest-seeming predictions come true. Forty years ago, he said that modern communications technology would turn the young into tribal primitives who pay attention not to objective “news” reports but only to what the drums say, i.e., rumors.
And there you have blogs. The universe of blogs is a universe of rumors, and the tribe likes it that way.”

Fair enough, but is this really a problem? Redefine “objective” as we redefine “news”.)

technorati tags: wall+street+journal, marshall+mcluhan, media, blogosphere, journalism, objectivity, news

I’m really enjoying working with Robert Meyer on his Musical Reminiscences. A double bassist who worked with Britten, de Sabata, and many others, Meyer participated in much of the classical recording and performance that occurred in London after the war, until the 60s when he moved to Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. His newsy reminiscences are always interesting to me. How do I help him? I take the emails he sends me and help them become bloggable. Then I post them with links to relevant additional information. And I handle any pesky spam issues.

We included his extensive discography which is introduced by a great article that really reveals the life of a working studio musician in London in those days. Through the blog Robert has been in contact with others, and has brought out even more stories than those he includes in his self-published book.

Check it out here.

A blog can really help when you are writing of a memoir, as it is episodic, and can be completed in stages, as it grows naturally. It seems easy, then the compiled blog postings can be edited together in book form. The people at Lulu have named this “the blook” - a book created from blog postings.

(This entry was included in the first LinkedIn Blog Carnival)