trust capital

07 Dec 2010

One Line Bios And Figuring Out Your Blog’s Story

story

One thing that appeals to people about blogging is that somehow, by doing it regularly, people figure out what it is that will make them happy in their lives.

Not everyone. Not always. But often enough, for people who really commit to blogging on a regular basis, whether they do it for personal or professional reasons, blogging has the effect of making you gravitate toward your real passions (a little part of me died inside writing that last word, just so you know). It has something to do with the act of writing down stuff every day — in the process of doing that, you sort of figure out your own story. You figure out where you fit into your own narrative.

Now, if you want to be a professional blogger, it’s not really enough to just meander around and get to your story when you feel like it. You’ve got to have your story ready to go right away, or at least act like you have it ready to go right away. And you cannot really make your story super complex and multi-layered, with a bunch of sub-plots and multiple dreaming sequences that require elaborate waking mechanisms like that movie with DiCaprio and the spinning top. Or rather, your story can be that complex, but you need to have an easy version ready so that everybody can remember you in the short term, before they have time to get to know you and all of the many different incarnations of special snowflake that make up you.

When you are a professional blogger, trying to reach people, you need to make a story that is really easy for people to understand. One of the things I was telling a consulting client last week was that all of the bloggers who are known have some kind of “thing” that is theirs. And that maybe it’s not such a great thing, but whatever, they own it. In the best cases, this thing isn’t the only thing they are, but it is the thing that allows them to be remembered. For Il Duce, it is “the first woman who was fired for writing about her job on the internet.” For Pioneer Woman, it is “the city gal who found love and moved to a cattle ranch.” I am “the mommyblogger who says what other mommybloggers only wish they could say.” Now, none of these things comprise the whole of our identities as bloggers — in fact, some of them are not even true, strictly speaking. But they are easy to latch onto. They are things.

Every blogger needs to figure out what their thing is going to be — what their short version story is going to be so that potential readers can grab onto it, and take it away with them easily. The thing becomes like a virtual business card for you, and even if the first person who takes it away is not your ideal reader, they might take it with them and give it to somebody who is — they might hear your name mentioned and then say, “Oh, she is the one who ____________” within earshot of just the right person. How do you go about developing your story? I can tell you that in my own case it was not intentional — it happened as a result of interacting with the community, of always feeling like I was standing in a room where there was something crazy happening and nobody was saying anything about it, and feeling compelled to say something. But the process reminded me of some ideas listed I read awhile back in a post by Anil Dash that dealt with one-line bios. The majority of the post is about some tech dude who invented RSS . . . blah blah who gives a crap, when are you going to get back to the part that pertains to me . . . ahh! Here: he featured Conan O’Brien’s Twitter bio as a particularly fantastic example of a story conveyed through a one line bio:

Dash’s advice for writing a one-line bio, which might be thought of as a quick way of expressing your thing, your story, to people who are quickly passing by, is as follows:

In that way, one-line bios strike me as offering some important lessons about the architecture of meaningful things on the web: They should be brief, and structured just enough to give you a starting point without constraining your creativity. They should pack in enough meaning that they have value on their own, but be useful when annotating a larger work. They should be portable enough to work on almost any kind of website. And they should be useful enough that they can succeed even if the ego of their creators is modest enough to not demand credit.

And you? What do you have to say of yourself?

Categories: bloggers and brands, monetizing the mommyblog Tags: blog story, trust capital

24 Nov 2010

Lots Of Sponsored Posts In Small Niche Significantly Less Annoying When Linked To Ostensibly Good Cause, Sans Phone Giveaway, Experts Say

By anna

Last week, I ranted a bit about the number of blogs who were doing the same sponsored giveaway on the same day for the Windows 7 phone. This week, there was another blanket sponsored post campaign appearing in some blogs represented by both Federated Media and Clever Girls Collective (now associated with Federated Media for these kind of deals) for American Express.

This campaign does not seem to have been run on as many blogs as the Microsoft campaign, though I would venture to guess that the number of total blogs participating was still pretty high (I don’t have total numbers as of the writing of this post), and though the saturation level was high enough to warrant comment, I found the experience significantly less annoying for several of reasons:

There’s no giveaway;

The “Small Business Saturday” theme leads to much more authentic-sounding and, potentially, interesting posts than the stupid “Less is More” writing prompt of the Windows campaign;

The idea of promoting small businesses is something I can get behind, even if it’s a huge credit conglomerate that is promoting it; and

It can *almost* masquerade as a do-gooder, altruistic cause instead of what it is, which is a highly paid advertising placement.

Part of me thinks this campaign is great because it’s very smart, and then part of me finds it very very sneaky and is suspicious of it. American Express is a credit card company and as such I find it not credible that they are doing anything like a disinterested promotion of small businesses. Also, these are paid placements, and they are almost capable of making you think that they are not paid placements because of that altruistic, Horatio Alger bent. From one angle, I want to applaud them, but then I also want to throw eggs at them. That’s kind of how I feel about capitalism in general, though.

I also wonder what the hell happened to regular old display ads. Have we given up on display ads? Are we only doing content column now? Because if so, ugh. I don’t think that’s a good plan. I don’t want to be chicken little, but the sky might fall if all we are going to do is content column ads from here on out.

Thoughts?

Categories: models, monetizing the mommyblog Tags: clever girls collective, Federated Media, trust capital

16 Nov 2010

Hey Microsoft: Sponsored Posts On 59 Blogs In The Same Tiny Niche Is Not Less, It’s Too Fucking Much

By anna

Windows recently launched a phone that nobody cares about. But rather than just accepting that fact, Microsoft did what any large company with a mediocre product does: they threw money at the problem. In the social media space, this translated into calling up Federated Media, signing up for content-column placements on 59 blogs in the FM network, scheduling them all for the same day, and having them promote a Windows 7 phone giveaway. The posts were organized under the deliciously ironic theme of “less is more,” because not only does a 59-blog campaign for an unnecessary smart phone illustrate this point, but because there’s nothing like a little lack of self-awareness to announce how well-suited a brand really is to the mommyblogging space.

I was trying to explain to Mr. Right-Click (a non-blog reading, non-social media kind of person) what the problem with this campaign was, and this proved tricky, so I’m guessing this must be why Microsoft thought this would be a good idea in the first place. And it must also mean that, while whomever they have in charge of landing placement deals over at FM these days is clearly talented in selling the idea of social media as an advertising tool, they are not actually consumers of social media or — at the very least — not willing to set aside financial concerns for a better use of the space itself. Here’s the thing: I’m a mommyblogger, so when I open up my reader on Monday, and start reading blogs, I see one giveaway and it’s no big deal. I see two giveaways and I might smirk. I see three giveaways and I start to get annoyed. But now I’m only five blogs into my daily blog reading and ALL of them feature the contrived writing prompt “less is more” sponsored by Microsoft, and bookended by a giveaway for a crappy phone?

Now I’m pissed. Now I’m wondering if there are any bloggers left who haven’t been bought off by Microsoft. Now I’m clicking through my reader trying to see just how bad the damage really is. Now I’m making droll observations to myself about how ~~every single one of the people~~ many of the people giving away these crappy Windows phones are enthusiastic an iPhone users. Now I’m getting on Twitter and making jokes about how bad this phone must be to require this kind of promotion. And now I’m going to find out how much these people sold their trust capital for — and it better be a lot of money, because I love bloggers to make money, god knows I do, but this is a bad deal made worse by the volume of it, and I’m hoping that none of them knew how many people were involved ahead of time and that this is just a giant clusterfuck that could have been avoided with some carefully asked questions.

But no. This campaign involved 59 blogs, and it is my understanding that people knew ahead of time how many people would be involved. Though there was some variation on how bloggers were paid according to traffic, and though I cannot give numbers I can tell you that I gasped when I heard how well paid this campaign was. So, I’m happy for these bloggers that they are getting good compensation for their content columns. I’m just not sure if the audience alienation is going to be worth it long term.

Am I overreacting?

Categories: bad ideas Tags: Federated Media, trust capital