Between trying to catch up on work and a publishing glitch this morning, there was a gap in my blog posts.
I was talking to one blog reader yesterday who said, “What happened? You didn’t post today.”
That’s great news. If you want to influence, if you want to lead, if you want to have voice and influence, the three words you most want to hear are “I missed you.”
Think about all the noise and commotion and all the competition for people’s attention. Think about big corporations spending millions to find a way to get to all the people who are TiVoing their favorite shows and SPAM filtering their emails and do-not-calling at home. Think of all the BlackBerry-buzzing, iPhone-app using, Kindle-reading cacophony of communication careening through everyone’s days.
If you have broken through so much that you’re missed, you’re doing well. And if you’re missed by 100 or 1,000 of the right people (for you!), you’ve arrived.
(Just to clarify, this post isn’t about blogging. It’s about your organization, your product, your program, your community, your career, your voice. It’s about you.)
Everything you write online (email, blog, twitter, text) can and will get anywhere else in an instant. This isn’t news, but ask yourself: do I write EVERY email/blog/tweet assuming that the people who are closest to this can and probably will read and share what I’m writing?
This isn’t just about search and the fact that web pages from 2002 still exist. And it isn’t only about whether your party photos on Facebook might get in the way of the job you hope to get a decade from now (though that matters a lot). It’s really about the power of tribes to amplify any idea and get that idea/thought/reflection in the right hands in an instant.
The most velocity is in tight networks where the word gets out silently and before you know it.
So why not assume that the people who know and care the most are reading everything you write, and there won’t be any surprises down the line? The upshot is that this isn’t just risk avoidance; it forces you to think big and imagine you have exactly the audience you dream of — because you just might.
This is as much about awareness as it is about discipline each and every time you write.
(and no, I didn’t have something fall into the wrong hands. But a few things in the last few days got into the right hands very very quickly, and man was I happy that I was conscious about each and every word I wrote.)
I recently was talking to a friend who I consider to be successful on Twitter: he has cracked 10,000 followers in a few months, tweets regularly, and his tweets regularly get picked up (retweeted) and cause a stir.
From his perspective, he’s a long way from the top of the Twitter foodchain, where people have hundreds of thousands of followers and are gaining 5,000+ followers a day (apparently @Oprah just tweeted for the first time this week…how psyched is Evan Williams?)
When networks of relationship are created, they are self-reinforcing, giving real power to early movers who establish themselves (who are in a different category than folks like Oprah who bring their fame to the table so are basically impossible to compete with…she joined 10 hours ago, has tweeted 6 times, and has 195,654 followers right now). This is why it’s incredibly difficult to jump from one circle to the next (100-1,000 followers vs. 1,000 to 10,000 vs. 10,000 to 100,000).
In terms of size of network, Facebook is already in its own category (more than 200 million users!). Twitter is still new enough (just) that you have a couple weeks left to join before you’re too late (heck, you can even start by following @sashadichter).
Here’s my take: microblogging will be good for serious bloggers. Yes, there will be a migration of “here’s what I was thinking” from blogs to Twitter/Facebook (the blogs that were just about people’s daily activities make more sense on Twitter/Facebook).
But if you consider this spectrum from microblogging to blogging to newspapers/news weeklies, the question to ask is: 5 years from now, after most of the weekly news magazines have gone out of businesses and many major local papers go belly-up, will there be more or less appetite for thoughtful, analytical, 400-500 word opinion pieces on what is going on in the world?
I think more, and I think bloggers who up their game, who serve a need for a loyal and growing group of followers, will be more in demand, not less, in the near future.
(Oh, and if you really want to be an early adopter, now’s the time to check on Flutter, the leading nanoblogging site. You heard it here first. Click below)
P.S. note the moment in time: “blogging” and “blogger” are both in my spellcheck. “Microblogging” isn’t.
(Food for thought: why is it so much easier to get Twitter followers than blog subscribers? Does it feel like a smaller commitment to follow someone on Twitter? Does that mean that in the endgame Twitter wins?)
A few months ago, I had arthroscopic surgery on my knee. This was my first surgery since a 1993 ski injury, when, younger and without much good sense, I skied off a marked “cliff area” that had no snow, and partially tore my ACL while causing considerable cartilage damage.
Four months ago, after my surgery, I began the normal course of physical therapy, a mostly routine undertaking involving stationary bikes, colored bands, and walking up and down a ‘step’ taken straight from 1980s aerobics classes.
The one bright spot comes at the end of therapy, when Jim, my therapist, puts two electrical stimulation pads on my knee and then wraps my knee in ice for 10 minutes. The stimulation is like a massage inside my knee. Aaaah!
Setting the stimulation level is a mildly medieval process: Jim turns the dial until I cry “uncle,” the level at which I can barely stand the intensity. That’s the most I can take. After a while the stimulation level drops, which I assumed was how the machine works, to let the patient ease out of the therapy session.
But here’s the surprise: Jim told me last week that the stimulation level doesn’t change at all. It’s my body that adjusts. So while Level 46 (whatever that means) is where I start, after 10 minutes I’m comfortable at Level 55 (he let me turn up the dial).
Right now you may feel like you are at your maximum potential – running flat out, working as hard as you can, doing as much as you can do. Don’t underestimate your ability to adjust and grow. Taking on that next big idea (starting a blog, launching a new project, mentoring a student) may put you just past your maximum today, but soon that maximum will be your new routine. You’ll adjust and you will have space for more.
I get the question a lot. So here’s a list. I originally wanted to come up with 99 reasons, but 44 is where I ended up.
(If you have serious additions to the list please comment and I’ll approve. I’d still like to get to 99, and if I do I’ll repost the whole list as “99 reasons we blog”).
It improves my writing
It forces me to learn how use new social media tools
It occasionally gives me a reason to fiddle with some HTML code
It’s practice creating a written end product faster
It’s a chance to experiment
It’s a chance to work on my storytelling every day
It’s a discipline
It’s a megaphone
It’s challenging to build my own tribe, from scratch
It makes me to be more aware of and informed about topics that interest me
It makes me a contributor to a community I respect
It’s a chance to go from observation to synthesis every day
It’s a diary of where my thinking is every day – and over time a reflection of the arc of where I am in my life
It’s a platform…who knows where that will go?
It’s free
It’s become a daily habit, and I’d miss it if it were gone
It makes my mom proud
It’s fun to have people email me interesting things and say, “You might want to blog this.”
It teaches me…about people, about writing, about technology, about storytelling.
It’s an act of letting go – to take an insight and put it out in the world, asking for nothing in return
I felt like I had something to say, and it turns out that I do
I think storytelling isn’t just interesting, it’s important
I started without a plan and in a short time have a good-sized group of readers – which means that there are a lot of people out there with shared interests who want to come together around these ideas.
I don’t see anyone else out there linking up marketing, storytelling, influence, nonprofits, philanthropy, and social change…and I think these things are intimately related.
I may inspire people I’ll never have a chance to meet
I can share wonderful, undiscovered gems with others
I’m a little compulsive
I think the reality of how philanthropists think and make decisions needs to be better integrated into the dialogue about what philanthropy “should” be
Marketing, storytelling, influencing, tribe-building, leading, creating, experimenting, sharing, testing, getting instant feedback…all good ways to spend my time.
More people read my blog every day than read my college thesis – and that took a year to write
Every so often, someone I don’t know emails me to say that something I wrote helped them
Every so often, someone I do know tells me to keep it up
Once you feel like (some) people are listening to you, it’s very hard to give that up
Unexpected posts often strike a chord with people…and the ones I love can bore people to tears
Learning what does and doesn’t work in spreading ideas online at a very low cost…THAT’S a skill that will only get more important over time
Maybe, someday, if I keep at this for a few years, they’ll be a book in it
And even if there isn’t, if I have a tribe of thousands of readers sharing what I’m writing with their friends, why exactly would I need to write a book?
Traditional newspapers and magazines are dying a slow death. Even if blogs aren’t the end game, distributed, independently-created content is.
You don’t have to know everything to start something. You just have to know enough, and be willing to let the other pieces fall into place over time. In the act of doing you’ll learn how to do “it” better and you’ll learn more about what “it” is.
For example, it’s taken until now for me to figure out how to place all of those fancy Web 2.0 icons at the bottom of each blog post. But I figured it out (it’s a little more trouble than I expected). And now I’m glad they are there. They make it easier for you to spread the word.
So go ahead. If a post (today, tomorrow, next week) strikes you as interesting, click a button. People love to hear from other people about what’s interesting and what’s worth reading.
In the meantime, I’m going to try to figure out if I know enough to start Twittering (yes); and if I have time to follow people on Twitter (maybe); and if I have time to tweet (probably not).
When you start reading a blog, you often end up missing most of what was written before you got there. Sure you can go back to the beginning, and you can use tags and search to find what you like, but all of these ideas beg a few questions:
1. When blogging, are you writing for your committed longtime readers (yes) or for new people (yes)?
2. As a blogger, should you occasionally repost “greatest hits” (e.g.: The 2008 Sasha Dichter Blog Wrapup) (yes, I think, but people don’t seem to click on the links nearly as much as read posts)
3. But wouldn’t it be kind of lame to just take a post from 9 months ago and repost it? (yes)
4. Once you’ve been blogging for long enough, should you look back, find some themes, and turn your blog into a book or an ebook? (hmmm, more interesting and more complicated)
At a minimum, I love the idea of someone creating a blog button that says “PDF this blog” and creates a PDF file of the whole blog (with the ability to customize the timeframe you want).
Since I don’t have these kinds of technical skills, I’m hoping someone reading will get on this ASAP.
(As a related idea, wouldn’t it be cool if you could go, say, to the NY Times site, click a button and get all of Nick Kristof’s columns? Oh wait, you can.)
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