Where does the Bloggosphere Intersect With the Real World?

Every day my inbox is packed with articles about the latest and greatest in SEO, social marketing trends, seminars announcements, new book promotions and tons of information about web communications, marketing and development. In just over a year’s time I have gone from knowing next to nothing about any of this stuff to knowing plenty.

I define “plenty” as enough to start a blog, figure out how to tag posts to draw traffic, know how to analyze metrics and see who’s reading and where they clicked in from, add wikis, and track back to other, much more prominent blogs in an attempt to get my voice heard. What I write about is incidental; the point of my blogging is to not only polish my writing skills but to put the tools I read about on a daily basis to use.

The results of what some would see as an exercise in futility have been very encouraging to me. When I started tracking traffic to my blog in August, 2007, I had 14 visits a month. Over time, as I not only started posting more frequently but started tagging posts, my readership slowly began to climb; in just 8 months I went from having 14 visits a month to, as of today, 309. These numbers may be miniscule for “real” bloggers or companies, but I think they’re not to shabby in this context—e.g. me, a nobody, writing about nothing in particular.

It’s one thing to have your mom and your sister reading—they don’t really count—but when you start drawing the attention of anonymous people all over the world it’s sort of gratifying. I’ve had visitors from Canada, Korea, England, Italy, to name just a few.

But more impressive—to me, at least—is the fact that I have drawn the attention of two very prominent public figures in the marketing and writing worlds. Maybe I’m easily impressed—ok, I am—but I think any way you look at it it’s pretty gratifying to have a best-selling author and prominent public speaker comment that a post on your blog is excellent and to liken you to himself a few years ago, or to have renowned writer, career advisor and public speaker email you telling you she read your blog and that she thinks it's excellent.

At any rate, all I can say is that, if nothing else, blogging gives you a definite sense optimism and confidence—two things that certainly come in handy in the real world, not just the blogosphere.

The Expert's New Clothes

I was trying to explain something to my daughter in terms of the classic tale "The Emperor's New Clothes." Having not read it in many a year, I was improvising, telling her it's a story about an Emperor who's not wearing any clothes but announces that he's wearing some really fancy suit or something. Everyone fears him and wants his approval so they all tell him how great he looks. I told her the moral of the story is that some people are stupid--they just want to be like everyone else and have everyone like them so they automatically buy into whatever the masses are saying is cool. Or something like that.

Anyway, I was just visiting one my new favorite sites, The Brazen Careerist--an "online career center" and compilation of blogs written exclusively by Gen-Yers. The brain child behind the Brazen Careerist is Penelope Trunk, my role model. Read her blog if you want to know why. Basically because she rocks and is smart and has "balls the size of church bells," to steal a phrase from some email joke I received the other day.

One of the featured articles was Reminder: Your Job Title is Not Your Personal Brand by resident blogger, Dan Schawbel.

Here is the first paragraph of his post:

When I ask college students “what do you want to do when you graduate,” they always respond the same way. They dictate a job title that is somewhat reflective of their current interest area or topic of study. A job title is what corporations want you to be, not what you want you to be. “I want to be an account executive at an advertising age” is not forward thinking, nor differentiates you from thousands of others who have the same short-term aspirations. Please take a step back and realize that you will just become a number if you promote yourself and set your objective on your resume to a job title.

Um, excuse me: "...“I want to be an account executive at an advertising age” is not forward thinking, nor differentiates you from thousands of others who have the same short-term aspirations"--wtf kind of sentence is that? Is he trying to say "...an account executive at Advertising Age is not forward-thinking, nor does it differentiate you from..."?

I was thinking maybe I should drop Penelope Trunk a line recommending that she not feature bloggers who can't write worth shit because it's a bad reflection on her. I then check out the guy's bio:

Dan Schawbel is the leading personal branding expert for the Gen Y audience, with an award winning and world recognized blog by AdAge, a TV podcast series that he directs, awards that he judges, and a magazine that he publishes. He has written over 40 published articles in major magazines and online resources such as MarketingProfs, About.com and The American Marketing Association and has been featured in Fast Company Magazine, BrandWeek Magazine, Boston.com, Providence Business News, Brand Strategy Magazine (UK) and Yahoo! Finance. He is also a columnist for JobWeb.com and TheLadders.com. Dan has 7 years of experience in marketing, working at Reebok, Lycos, LoJack, TechTarget and EMC to name a few. Dan is also a frequent speaker at colleges and a mentor to students looking to establish their personal brand. He's is on the board of advisor's for a new geo-social startup called ((Echo)) Myplace and graduated magna cum laude from Bentley College in 2006.

You're telling me that the guy who wrote the horrible article above is very successful and, in fact, the "leading personal branding expert for the Gen Y audience"? Obviously this guy is a genius at selling his personal brand because he has apparently convinced the likes of Reebok, Lycos, Yahoo and even my idol, Penelope Trunk, that he is a good writer when he clearly is not. I mean, let an editor re-write his articles and I'm sure they're fine, but isn't that pretty much true of anything that anyone writes?

So back to my original parallel: Penelope Trunk must either be asleep at the wheel or drinking the proverbial Kool Aid because she's obviously bought into the idea that this guy can write and is worth featuring on her site.

Why Blog?

I'm not going to let this article shatter my "write about nothing and eventually it will magically result in some kind of money-making windfall" theory.

Minutes after I read that article, this showed up in my inbox (I subscribe to David Meerman Scott's blog, Webinknow).

Just as I wrote about Mimi Smartypants in my personal blog, here is yet another example of someone who started out blogging just to blog and--bam--wrote a book (The Fortune Cookie Chronicles) and became so well-known that random people now approach her in public to tell her their book groups are reading her books. Hell, you can look her up on Wikipedia because she's famous enough to warrant an entry.

If nothing else, blogging, in my opinion, is the equivalent of physically training for a race. It gets you used to sticking with something, especially if you try to force yourself to write every day. It polishes your writing skills and actually provides you with writing samples, should a future job require them. Even if nobody's reading it, your blog is still, in essence, a publication and at the very least can serve as a showcase for your talent (or lack thereof).

Blogging encourages you to learn new things; after all you have something to write about every day and my personal life is just not that interesting. While my personal blog, Motherwhatnowredux, started as a stream-of-conscious dump of whatever particular feelings or experiences I had on any given day, it has actually become sort of a sounding board for issues I find interesting from a professional standpoint. Blogging allows me to learn and grow professionally outside the confines of my real job.

Even though I average about 10 hits a day (if that), I write as if I actually have an audience. It's like singing into your hairbrush--you're less inhibited when you know nobody's watching. If I were getting paid to blog about a particular subject I'd have to worry staying on topic and always sounding professional and intellectual. The beauty of blogging to basically nobody but my mother, sister and a few random readers is that one day I can write about something at least remotely intellectual, then the next day post the latest and greatest from Engrish.com or some stupid video from YouTube. Not to mention let the f word fly if I'm so inclined.

At any rate, who knows--maybe a year from now you'll be reading my Wikipedia entry and buying my book.