Case Study in a starving blog
This past January, I started producing a weekly live video webcast at work called PTV Live. Even though it’s only a half hour once a week, my co-workers were pretty sure that I wouldn’t be able to keep it going for more than a couple of months. Even though I had never done anything like this before, I was confident I’d be able to get it done. After all, all I really had to do was give our opinions on blog posts and news about online video marketing. As my father-in-law says, opinions are like . . . well, let’s just say- everyone has one.
In the past few months, I’ve also been spending a lot of time on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and FriendFeed. I’ve been able to meet a ton of new people and learn a lot because of my interactions on these social sites. But, creating lots of short form content is a great deal different than the long form blog content I’d been used to. I have not been able to switch gears to keep all these content creation engines humming.
Well, it’s 5 months later. I”ve successfully produced 20 shows, and been followed by and have followed several hundred interesting people. Not bad! But, looking back on my efforts, I can see it’s had a dramatic affect on this blog. My twitter digest, once just a single post in a week of other content, has taken over as primary content, like a virus that has eaten up every other decent idea for a conversation I’ve had in the past few months.
Here are a few lessons I’ve learned about myself and blogging. I’m not sure if these are universal rules. I think they might be.
- Short form content is not long form content. Don’t install a Twitter Digest widget on your blog platform. Having your Twitter stream in a sidebar is one thing, but having an automated bot post daily or weekly entries gives you yet another reason not to post to your blog. You’ll end up with 33 consecutive posts titled “Tweet Tweet, My Week.”
- Cut your losses with old, half-dead posts. One of my ideas was to do a running column titled “Heads-Up Tech” – pitting 2 similar web technologies against in each other. I had been dragging my feet on finishing up a decent column about Last.fm vs. Pandora. But then Mashable released it’s Pandora vs. Last.fm post. Yeah, it’s professionally written, but I still couldn’t get over how much more better and more complete it was. I stared at my draft post, off and on, for the next 6 months until I finally just deleted it.
- Share less, explain more. Last week, I tried Sessmic Desktop after being a happy TweetDeck user for 9 months or so. There were some key features missing, and it didn’t make sense to me to learn a whole new UI that offered basically the same feature set as the one I was used to. My 140 character mindset fired off a quick missive and moved on. Yeah, it was great to share my thought, but it would have made a better “Heads-Up Tech” post.
- A blog is about content, not widgets. In the 6 months that I haven’t been writing content, I’ve installed dozens of themes and played around with bunches of widgets. I had fun playing with the technology when I should have been writing.
- It’s just a blog. I’m not writing for Time or Newsweek. It’s ok to write a post that’s . . . Ok. No need to win the Pulitzer each and every week. When I have a thought, I’ll write about it quickly and get it out there.
One last thing – an apology. I’m sorry to those who had subscribed via email and to my RSS feed. You thought you were signing up for one thing, and got something else instead. Here’s looking forward to a different approach for the rest of ’09.
