My Biggest Blog Pet Peeves!
My new job often keeps me so busy that even taking a break for lunch is impossible, but this afternoon things slowed down a bit. So, I spent a little time searching for and reading new blogs with the hopes of gaining some inspiration, information and maybe a laugh or two.
I used a couple of new blog searches I’ve discovered like Blog Flux and a few of my old stand-bys like Technorati. But after an afternoon of blog discovery, the only thing I have to show for all my time spent is a case of mild frustration.
If you’re wondering why I’m so peeved, here you go. The following are my major issues with several blogs I’ve encountered today.
I hate blogs and bloggers when…
…they tell me what to do/how to blog. Well, actually they tell me what not to do and how not to blog. However, the problem isn’t with the advice. I take offense with the tone in which they offer their opinions. If I wanted to be criticized for my actions I’d hang out with my older brother.
…I find a blog that sounds really interesting, only to find out that the blogger hasn’t updated since January…of 2005! Is it too much to ask that people remove their blogs if they’re not planning on actively engaging? I don’t think so.
…they treat their posts like diary submissions. Unless you’re Barack Obama, Tiger Woods or Brittany Spears, I don’t care what you did last Thursday night or what you ate for breakfast this morning…I wonder if Barack likes Grape Nuts…
…anyway…
…when a blog is neither useful, funny, insightful or smart. See peeve #3.
Now that I’ve finished my rant, this post feels a bit foreign to me. Although I am often sarcastic, I am rarely negative or pessimistic. So, in the hopes of lifting my spirits, I’ve included a couple of things I love most about blogs:
I love blogs and bloggers when…
…they make me laugh so hard that the people around me either think I’m crazy or want to get in on the joke (sometimes both).
…they have great applications and widgets on their pages that I later attempt and fail to add to my own blog.
…they make me think about an issue in a different way.
…they give me useful advice that I want to include on my own blog.
…they provide the kind of relevant information that I can regurgitate to coworkers and sound smart.
In case you were wondering, I’m not the only blogger who finds herself frustrated with the bloggosphere. Here are some other bloggers’ blog pet peeves:
- Darkside Dreamland …Why so many blogs piss me off…
- Original G.R.I.T.S. Blog reading pet peeves.
- Bloggerdygook What are your blogging pet peeves?
image from sarahintampa.com
Justifying My Addiction…to Twitter.
It’s been several months since I was first exposed to the newest and most alluring drug on the market: Twitter. For the first couple of months, I “tweeted” only recreationally, you know, when I was bored and looking for something fun to fill the time. Plus, everyone was doing it. If I could keep it under control, why couldn’t I do it too?
But now that I have a job at which I sit in front of a computer screen for much of my day, my addiction to Twitter has reached a dangerous level. Shockingly, it has even joined forces with my CrackBerry obsession through an application called Twitterberry, which allows me to obsessive compulsively update Twitter from my phone.
So, like all true addicts, in an attempt to justify my addiction, I’ve come up with the top five things I (and you) can do with this dangerous yet great thing we call Twitter.
5. Keep your loved ones updated on your life. Awwww!
4. Get updates in real-time from your favorite news outlets (have I mentioned how much I love NPR?)
3. Stay up to date with colleagues for on the spot insights on projects your team is working on, opportunities to lend a helping hand or opinion, or simply be in the know about what’s going on in their lives.
2. Make your friends jealous of how fabulous, successful and busy your life is.
1. Follow dramatic people you don’t know. Also known as having constant access to the most amazing reality show you’ve ever encountered.
Click here to follow my addiction for yourself.
images from Twitter.com
Fattening Up Your Resume for Today’s Job Famine.
Unless you’ve been drunk for the past several months, you are probably aware that our economy isn’t doing so well. For recent college graduates, this probably means that getting a job will be harder than expected. But there is hope.
According to Livingston Communication’s blog The Buzz Bin, although the economy sucks, new media continues to thrive, and by highlighting your new media experience, you can rise above the rest.
Social Media Beefs Up Resumes provides five tips to bolster your resume.
1. Highlight past experiences, like your personal blog and social networking, as much as possible.
2. When you talk about social media, don’t just chat about blogs. Remember that blogging is another way of building relationships and engaging in two-way communication.
3. Check out your personal Google search results. Make sure you walk your talk.
4. Although social media experience is great, be careful not to specialize. A well-rounded resume is still important.
5. Be able to cite examples from other successful social media efforts besides your own.
image from georgetowncustomhomes.com
Dear Webmaster. I suck.
With the rapid growth of social media, bloggers are now a huge subsection of the media to whom we public
relations people are pitching stories. Here’s a couple of quick tips on pitching bloggers from The New PR.
1. Don’t begin with “Dear Webmaster.”
2. Don’t talk to bloggers like they’re stupid.
3. Don’t pitch blogs that are clearly unrelated to your content.
4. When you have the blogger’s name, use it. And make sure to spell it correctly.
Also, do your homework on the blogger, so you don’t say something completely off-base or just plain stupid. Unlike traditional media, bloggers control a medium with which they can tag you publicly as a loser by blacklisting you or your company. Good luck and pitch wisely.
image from insurancetechguru.com
LinkedIn: Facebook for Grown-Ups.
So, I’ve been on Facebook for nearly four years now, and I am sorry to admit it, but the online community is losing its luster. Gone are the days of excitedly adding everyone I encounter or enthusiastically skimming through spring break photos of random people on my friends list. It just doesn’t do it for me anymore.
Now that I’m in the recovery stage of my Facebook addiction, I find that I have more time in the day. Apparently, Facebook is a combination of a black hole and a break in the space/time continuum. When on Facebook, productivity mysteriously vanishes and in an instant you’ve traveled two hours forward in time. Is it just me, or does that make surfing Facebook sound like a bad episode of the Twilight Zone?
The frightening realities of Facebook aside, even with all my newly discovered free time, I still feel like something is missing.
The remedy? LinkedIn. This social networking site was created for finding and building business relationships online. It’s basically Facebook, but your friends aren’t the group of random guys you met at a fraternity party freshman year and never talked to again.
I know it’s a scary transition. Instead of posting pictures of yourself soused at the bar last weekend, you can post industry questions for established professionals. It doesn’t sound like as much fun, and it isn’t but it can be a useful tool for networking. You just have to know how to use it.
Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn by blogger Guy Kawasaki explains to those in the Facebook generation exactly how to get more from the site. Here are some of the highlights of how you can best use LinkedIn.
1. Integrate into a new job. It can help you connect more quickly with your peers by providing you the opportunity to learn about them through their profiles and connections.
2. Ask for advice. LinkedIn Answers allows you to post business-related questions to the entire LinkedIn community.
3. Gauge the health of a company. You can check out former employees and find out what they thought about the previous company they worked for. Uncheck the “current employees only” box, and you can search the listed names to guesstimate turnover rates etc. Did most of the former employees only stay with the company a year? What does that mean for the organization or the industry?
4. Make your interview go smoother. Find out about the person who is interviewing you. Did you go to the same school, volunteer at similar programs, or share connections? These might be good topics to break the ice.
5. Improve your Google PageRank. Ever since the Sex and the City girls began Googling their men, we’ve all been curious about our own Google name search. Making your profile available for search engines to index allows your LinkedIn profile to appear high your name’s search results.
UPDATE: Last week I accepted a position with one of the largest and best PR agencies in Portland. PR job of my dreams? Check.
The Darker Side of Blogging
I’m a newcomer to blogs and blogging. I’ll admit it. I had heard about the revolutionary medium for information and entertainment, but I was a true skeptic. After some research and this blog assignment in my advanced PR writing class, I have begun to learn more about these things we call blogs. Obviously, I have been converted and now see the error in my previous thinking.
I know all about the positive outcomes of blogging for PR purposes and beyond, but I’ve read very little on the darker side of the blogosphere – the consequences no one wants to talk about.
So, here they are, several of the negative aspects of blogs and blogging for those of you who have yet to fully submerge yourselves in the treacherous world that is blogging.
1. On the average day, you will spend more time reading blogs and blogging than you will talking to your friends, being in c
lass and sleeping combined.
2. Unless your parents are blogging themselves, your mom will forever refer to it as “blobbing.”
3. You’ll read the same information over and over but will be unable to resist clicking through to the next page about Brittany Spears’ newest tragedy.
4. Whenever something interesting, exciting or humorous happens during your day, your first inclination will be to find the nearest computer and blog about it.
5. Addiction is inevitable – see point one. Soon, as celebrities are checking into drug rehab, we will be introducing ourselves at BA: Bloggers Anonymous.
“Hi, my name is Katy, and I am addicted to blogging.”
“Hi, Katy.”
6. There is tons of advice on writing a blog, 10 Tips for Writing a Blog, 5 Simple Ways to Open Your Blog Post With a Bang, but there is little out there on how to recognize and overcome your blogging addiction.
So, what’s the moral of this tragic story? We’re all doomed. So, we might as well enjoy it.
Photo courtesy of my mom, Renae, who is very proud of my “blobbing.”
“So, You’ve Got the Job. Now What? My First Podcast
I’ve been blogging a lot about interviewing for the PR job you want, but let’s flash forward a couple of months. You got the job. But after all the preparation for applying and landing your dream job, what do you do now?
While offering more information on keeping your new job in PR, I’ve begun to stretch my social media legs by venturing into the frightening exciting world of podcasting. Check out my first podcast, “So, You’ve Got the Job. Now What?”. It covers everything about your new job, from things you should know about your PR career, to communicating with your boss to outsmarting office politics.
The information came from three great blog posts.
Five Things All PR Students Should Know About Their Choice of Career by Steven Silvers, author of Scatterbox.
Conversation with the Boss by Lauren Vargas, author of Communicators Anonymous.
Office Politics 101 by Colin McKay, author of Canuckflack.
image from busylifeproducts.com
Obama’s My Friend on Facebook. Jealous?
Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are the new frontier in media, marketing and communications. From Facebook’s sponsorship of presidential debates to Obama’s nearly immediate efforts via Facebook, MySpace and several fully-loaded websites, it seems that even the most archaic practices of our nation are turning to social media to get the race won.
Facebook and MySpace are giving candidates the platform to introduce themselves, their qualifications and their ideas, so why aren’t soon-to-be college graduates treating their public blogs, Facebook and MySpace pages the same way?
We all know that today companies have access to even the most heavily guarded online information. We’ve heard the stories of graduating seniors who were denied the job because the company found not-so flattering subject matter associated with the potential employee. We know the deal. We hear the stories. Yet, we fail to act.
If candidates from Obama to McCain are successfully marketing themselves on Facebook, why aren’t we?
It’s a sad fact, and one that I would like to forget, but we are getting older and will soon be graduating from college and childhood. But instead of packing up your Harry Potter books and old teddy bear to mark this transition, why not clean up the junk on your Facebook profile? Take the lead from the politicians whose job it is to successfully sell themselves: put your best profile forward. You won’t regret it.
Employee Blogs: Friend or Farce?
Could a bad cup of coffee land you in hot water?
It seems that many organizations are venturing in to the world of employee blogging. From Microsoft employees to restaurant chefs, companies are looking to employees to blog agreeably about their job and the company they work for.
The most interesting example I could find was the Goodwill Ambassablog written by Goodwill Ambassadors and operated by Goodwill Ambassadors of the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority. Part promotion and part personal journal, each day the three authors blog about their experiences and interactions at the San Diego Airport.
Employee blogs seem to be successful and offer a unique glimpse into the work days of employees. But as more and more companies capitalize on the free promotion and employee-reader interaction that employee blogs provide, I begin to wonder if employee associated blogging is really as good as it sometimes seems.
Google Inc. may agree with me. In January 2005,Google removed some personal blog posts from a new Google employee because of content that criticized the company.
In the future, if employees are required to blog about certain topics and with provided viewpoints, will the blogosphere become a restricted forum? Will companies be allowed to control all employee content, even on personal blogs?
As the number of random affiliations between companies increases with the concentration of corporate ownership, where will the rational limits on employee content stop and the crazy company expectations begin?
If, for example, you are doing PR for a large agency who represents hundreds of clients. One day, while blogging on your personal blog after work, you offhandedly mention that the morning coffee you got from the cafe down the street was terrible. You go on to say that luckily you had such an amazing day at your amazing job that the bad coffee just didn’t matter. You find out later, however, that your firm represents that coffee shop in some distant division or has some obscure partnership and that top execs are angered by the negative publicity for the shop in your blog post. They insist you remove it.
Should a company have control over an employee’s freedom to express her opinions? Eventually, as more people begin to blog, will companies strive to monitor even personal blogs for content that could negatively impact the company, its clients or its affiliated organizations? Who knows?
image from whatscookingamerica.net
Surfing New Media: It’s Sink or Swim
The more I learn about social media public relations, the more I think that traditional PR is on the way out. These days it seems like distributing information and getting publicity is impossible without using the newest technology. As social media tactics get more elaborate, the more the old black and white press release loses influence and credibility.
We are a PR generation caught in the middle, and any new graduate without knowledge of how to ride the social media tide will be left on the beach.
Luckily, many colleges around the country are beginning to catch onto the media transformation currently happening in PR. There are also a lot of new media disseminating information about new media – like the example below.
Steve Rubel of Edelman Public Relations, Senior Vice President and blogger of Micro Persuasion talks about the impact of social media on PR.
