Entries Tagged 'blogging' ↓

Jennifer Perkins of Naughty Secretary Club is a celebrity in the indie/DIY craft scene. A member of the Austin Craft Mafia which launched dozens of chapters worldwide, Jennifer’s jewelry has been featured in numerous magazines including Bust and Seventeen. She also has her own TV show, Craft Lab, on HGTV.On top of all of that, Jennifer is a soon-to-be published author! Her book, The Naughty Secretary Club: The Working Girl’s Guide to Handmade Jewelry, hits bookstores on August 11.

In her blog this week, Jennifer evaluates some of the social networking opportunities for authors.

Jennifer’s also a good example of how the use of online video can help boost publicity for a book. She filmed a video of herself making one of the projects for her book and it’s now syndicated in various places on the web.

What is the best way to blog? Be yourself.

Marrus, an artist and acquaintance of mine, maintains a blog at LiveJournal. A friend of hers, Jeff Simmons, recently wrote about her in his own blog, Can Someone Please Explain?. In his post, Jeff credits Marrus’ achievements in integrated marketing.

One of the reasons that Marrus’ blog is such a delight to read is because it seamlessly blends the lines between her artistic profession and her life outside of work. Some days you’ll read about her pet chicken and other days you’ll hear about her fight to sell prints of her artwork in New Orleans’ French Quarter.

The strongest reason, however, that Marrus has so many cyberfans reading her blog is that it is sincere. She keeps an online journal because she wants to — not, I believe, with any marketing slant in mind.

So if you want to check out a good example of an artist’s blog, whether for inspiration or pure enjoyment, jump over to Marrus’ journal.

I’m a newbie to Twitter. I was in social networking overload (well, I still am…) and didn’t want to bother with something new. But as of last week, I’m a convert. It’s fun, and I can definitely see the potential publicity uses for business.

Twitter is a “micro-blogging” tool. You communicate with your Twitter followers with 140-character or less updates — called “tweets.” You post your updates and read your followers’ either via the web or a mobile device.

There are some cool resources for Twitter that I’ve discovered in the past week, including a couple sent to me by my friend and former co-worker Loki:

• Summize - Search Twitter conversations to find people with similar interests.
• Loud Twitter - Automatically send your tweets to your regular blog.
• twitAbit - Queue up your tweets when Twitter is down — which lately seems to be quite often!
• Twitter Feed - Send your regular blog posts to Twitter.
• Twitter Fox - An interface for Twitter via an add-on for Mozilla Firefox.

What are some of your favorite resources for Twitter? What are some of your favorite uses for Twitter, either for your business or from a personal perspective?

Follow me on Twitter!

I love this post at Business and Blogging called “What Eleanor Roosevelt Could Teach You about Blogging for Business.” Liz Fuller’s analysis is right on the mark and her entry has some great tips for blogging.

She hits on a pet peeve of mine, too:

Clarity - Eleanor wrote for a widely dispersed audience with varying levels of education and life experiences. She made sure that her articles could be understood by farmers, businessmen and senators alike. She did this by writing with no pretense and no jargon.

Yes indeed, Liz!

Ana [last name removed*], an employee of marketing company Digital Axle, apparently sent an email to numerous top bloggers a few days ago, trying to engage them in conversation about a recently released promotional video for Bluetooth’s Jawbone headset.

One of her contacts, Lee Odden at Top Rank Online Marketing Blog, criticized Ana’s methods in a post entitled, “You Make Me Sick - Viral Video Response.” In the post, Leo posted the majority of Ana’s email to him and blasted Digital Axle for their involvement with such a “sick, racist and violent” video.

According to Bruce Carlisle, CEO of Digital Axe, Ana was merely trying to engage fellow bloggers in a discussion of the video, which Digital Axe has no affiliation with, and was doing so for the purpose of promoting the Digital Axe blog. Many commenters at Lee’s blog are still adamant about calling Ana’s email a pitch, despite Bruce’s pretty transparent explanation.

There are definitely lessons to be learned from this minor fiasco. Here are my Top Five:

1. Email Is Not Private

Never assume that an email you send privately to someone will remain private. Emails get forwarded all the time. Emails you send to online media could get posted publicly in part or in whole. It’s happened to me.

Personally, I would never post someone else’s email in entirety without their permission. I’ve seen other bloggers do it and I think it’s an unfair practice. If I did post someone’s email without permission, I wouldn’t include identifying details.

As a side note, never publicly post someone else’s email address without their permission. If you do, be sure to mangle the address to deter spambots.

2. Transparency is Key

In her email, Ana should have immediately disavowed herself and Digital Axle from the Bluetooth video. Furthermore, she should have just stated her purpose for sending the video link to Lee in the first place.

When you’re writing to a blogmaster in order to solicit a review of your book, for example, just be up front about it. Being coy or forging a fake friendship is not the way to go about it. If you exchange a couple of emails then drop the review bomb on them, it is not going to go over as well.

3. Respond to Negativity

I applaud the Digital Axle CEO for commenting on the blog post not once, but twice. By including his explanation on the original blog post, he made sure that all future visitors to the site would see his side of the story. Simply posting an explanation on the Digital Axle blog would not have been as effective.

By the way, I hope someone at Digital Axle is monitoring their Google Alerts in order to properly address any future criticism on this issue, particularly any posts that do not give the full story.

I encourage clients to respond to all online mentions of themselves, even negative ones. In some cases, especially negative ones.

4. Admit You’re Wrong

After Digital Axle’s clarifying comments, the original blogger, Lee, edited his post to draw attention to what Bruce said. In Lee’s own comments on the blog post, he still asserted that Ana’s email was misleading, but did acknowledge that there was new information which made his initial allegations not quite as harsh.

If information comes that changes the sentiment of a blog post, it’s perfectly ok to edit it. Edits should be made as additions to a post, however, not actually deleting things. Always document these edits within the post in some way. Usually, simply adding a line at the top or end of the post like “Edit: blah blah blah” will suffice.

5. Write About It Yourself

I’m not sure why Ana chose to ask other bloggers to write about something in order to promote her own blog. It would have made a lot more sense to write a great blog post about the Bluetooth video herself, then invite her peers to the Digital Axle blog to discuss it.

Why give the traffic to other blogs?

Update 2/25/08: Check out Lee’s additional comment for another good pointer. By the way, Lee took out identifying details from his original post, so I’ve followed suit and removed Ana’s last name from my original post.

[Jawbone video screen cap credit: Lee Odden]

Although I’m not necessarily a fan of romance novels in general, I’m a huge fan of the blog Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. One of my favorite things about this blog is their series of book cover snarking.

On January 7, SBTB posted allegations of plagiarism by romance writer Cassie Edwards, citing numerous examples of text from her novels that were strangely similar to works by other writers in various genres. Bummer, Cassie.

Four days later, the Associated Press picked up the story and The New York Times wrote about it one day after that. Both stories mention SBTB and link to the site. Way to go, ladies!

If you visit Smart Bitches, Trashy Books now, you can see how they are taking advantage of this publicity. In the upper right corner, the first thing you’ll see is a link to a PDF file entitled, “A Centralized Document of the Cassie Edwards Texts.” A little further down, you’ll see where SBTB aggregated links to all relevant posts they’ve made on the subject.

This is a great example of how to respond to sudden increased exposure of your website or blog. Make it easy for new visitors to find what lured them to your site in the first place.

These Smart Bitches are smart. Very smart.

I do wonder how this negative publicity will affect Edwards’ sales and fan base. She’s been very popular through the years, writing over 100 romance novels. Or at least putting her name on the cover. According to The New York Times article, some fans are calling for a boycott of her work. Her publisher, Signet Books, is also investigating the claims.

If you were Edwards’ publicist, how would you deal with this backlash? It’s not often that crisis management really comes into play when representing authors.

If you use WordPress, be sure to install the latest update, which is an “urgent security release” according to the WordPress blog. It also fixes some minor bugs.

As with any software update to your blog, be sure to back up your data before you install the patch. There is no need to upgrade if your blog is hosted directly on the WordPress site.

Get some help on the upgrade at the WordPress site at this link, or  search the support forums.

DreamHost, my webhost provider, has a very candid approach to their corporate blogging. Many of their customers seem to love the down to earth style of communications. Other customers, however, don’t appreciate the humor when it comes to big mistakes the company has made.

Last month, there was a huge billing error to the tune of millions of dollars. DreamHost’s automatic billing system accidentally overcharged many customers. DreamHost CEO Josh Jones wrote an apologetic blog post, infused with the silliness that is DreamHost’s signature. After reader comments like, “For such a vast problem, I don’t think the jokey tone really serves you well. I usually don’t mind it, but in this case, it is a bad idea,” DreamHost issued another apology via their blog.

Comments on the blog seem split nearly 50/50 with customers who either are offended by DreamHost’s humorous style, or those who stay with DreamHost for exactly that reason. There were similar reactions about a year ago when there was another big problem. (See: Anatomy of a(n ongoing) Disaster and Anatomy of a Disaster, Part 2)

The lesson here is to use appropriate tone on your blog. Sometimes you might forget that people are reading. Although you may not have many readers when you first start, remember that nearly everything you put on the Internet can exist forever, even once it’s deleted. The archiving power of the Internet has only grown. Geez, I can still find discussion group postings I made nearly 10 years ago when I was selling on eBay to help pay for college.

For what it’s worth, I’ve been a DreamHost customer for over 5 years now. Thankfully, I was not affected by the billing error since I seldom enroll in any automatic billing plans. But I can remember the days, not too long ago, when a billing error to my debit card — even if only a couple hundred dollars — would have made rent checks bounce or left me without money to buy groceries, as other DreamHost customers have complained.

I will stay a DreamHost customer. My tech support requests have always been met quickly and efficiently. And I will never forget how DreamHost gave a full year of free hosting to customers in the New Orleans area right after Hurricane Katrina. It was certainly nice to know that I didn’t have to worry about paying for webhost service while trying to replace everything I owned. To be honest, I don’t think they ever blogged about that.

Ponn Sabra of Empower Women Now, a great blog for female entrepreneurs, posted a request yesterday for guest bloggers:

“Please offer a guest post, interview, book or product review. Want to offer something new? Give it a shot!

Very basic criteria: 500+ words. In return you’ll get a bylines of 2-5 lines with up to 2 link backs!”

Ponn suffers from a disabling brain disorder and had been MIA from her blog for months until yesterday’s post. You can read the full post here.