Commenting on How To Plan Your New Site Before You Decide Which CMS To Use | CMS Jam
An excellent article that can be applied when launching a new site, but equally to do an audit on an existing site (though your options will be necessarily limited).
The choice of CMS will still be far from trivial, but I’d agree that the information developed in the above process is necessary.
Comment on Why Do You Blog? [POLL RESULTS]
ProBlogger published the results from its mini-poll ‘why do you blog?’.
If you’re not blogging for money of fame, you’d better take a lot of the advice on blogging with a pinch of salt.
Bookmarking some of the best articles from copyblogger:
Writing Headlines for Regular Readers, Search Engines, and Social Media – or why headlines matter even more.
How to Write a Social Media Press Release – about writing ready-to-publish articles rather than releases for the press, as a winnning strategy.
10 Effective Ways to Get More Blog Subscribers – some of them easy, others easier said than done.
5 Simple Ways to Open Your Blog Post With a Bang – because after your title, your opening sentence is the prime content for any blog post.
The 10 Second Rule: How to Write for Diagonal Readers – understanding how readers read helps you to write for them.
The 5 Immutable Laws of Persuasive Blogging – the basic recipe of the blogpost.
Ernest Hemingway’s Top 5 Tips for Writing Well – 4+1 writing rules.
While agreeing that not every company should blog, there must be a middle ground between corporate sites updated once in a while, and daily blogging. If upfront about it, you can get away with weekly posting, or even erratic posting a couple of times per month. But if you’re going below a few times per month, you’re no longer in the blogosphere.
Blogging does not come free, but you should be doing a lot of it anyway (researching, monitoring). The marginal cost of blogging is well below its total cost.
Blogging is not for everybody. For companies, not only must you have something to say, but also there needs to be a need to reach out to the blogosphere (a big question for many niche companies) as well as a relative absence of risk from exposure.
Comment on As Media Multiply, So Do ‘Conceptual Scoops’ : NPR
“A smart story often does contain new facts,” Bennett explains. “But just as often it takes facts that are lying in plain sight and synthesizes them, or arranges them in a way — sometimes in a narrative — that really exposes some new meaning on an important subject. And I think that’s a conceptual scoop.”
Phil Bennett , Washington Post
Referring to above quote, are you running a news or insight blog. Running a news service as a lone blogger can be quite uncomfortable. So don’t apologize to your readers for being late on a story. Your blog is about connecting the dots, not breaking stories.
Comment on Blogs Let Amateurs Steal Your Business Expertise
Chris Baggott reports on a Newsweek story about the absence of business actors in the blogosphere, and amateurs filling the gap.
Isn’t this what mainstream media do on a daily basis. When it comes to specialised topics, many journalists – while communication professionals – are ‘amateurs’ on the subject they report on. And facts may be checked, but insights cannot. And often stories reported in media are framed in peculiar ways (which is one of the reasons why business hires agencies).
The line between amateurs and professionals may be fading. Amateurs have access to unprecedented information and networking resources over the internet that professionals tend to underusing. This levels the playing field. Except for areas which require specialised laboratories or access to proprietary information, enthusiastic amateurs can nowadays give professionals a run for their money.
Often, I find the main challenge in technical communication to be that specialists don’t write well, while communicators do not know the subject area. This could be the reason for the tension between technical and communication departments that’s often observed in organisations.
So what’s easier? For a specialist to learn how to communicate, or for a communicator to learn a subject area. The specialist’s problem is largily attitudinal, and hence can change almost instantly when internally motivated. Mastering a new subject area takes a bit more time.
