Christopher S. Penn : Awaken Your Superhero » Blogging

Three Words for 2012

Christopher S Penn — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 12:02:08 +0000

Every year since 2006, friends of Chris Brogan put together our three words for the coming year that define what we’re focusing on in the coming year. They’re not goals, but more like rails or guides that help keep us moving in the general correct direction. Here are mine for 2012.

Story

When I look at what I’ve created in the past few years, there’s value in the content. How-to lessons, detailed research, data and techniques, but something’s been missing. Something’s been lacking. On the way home from the dojo one night, I was listening to master teacher Stephen K. Hayes talking about how the deeper lessons of both Buddhism and ninjutsu are transmitted. He said, “We’re going to tell a few stories here, and hopefully this will evoke some stories in your mind of your own. That’s how this training works.” At that moment I realized exactly what has been missing from a lot of my work. In 2012, one of my three words and focus points will be on better learning this skill.

Restoration

One of the more interesting healing classes in World of Warcraft is the restoration druid. Rather than heal with holy powers and flashes of light, the druid uses the powers of nature to restore allies to health. Regrowth, nourish, rejuvenation, lifebloom, swiftmend, tranquility. Here’s what’s powerful about the idea of restoration druid spells on real life: so much of what we’ve done in the past few years has burned everything to the ground. We’ve exhausted our email lists. We’ve tapped out our social networks. We’ve cut staff down to the bone to scrape up a few extra pennies per share on earnings calls. In short, we’ve depleted all of our resources and wondered why our marketing is getting less and less effective. In 2012, one of my study points will be restoration. How do we continue to be effective as marketers while restoring our resources to health?

This extends to personal life as well. When you go all-out, inevitably, something has to suffer. My question to myself is, how can I bring restoration and regrowth to areas of my life other than business?

Compassion

Originally I had chosen something else for the third word, but as I was looking over the years, I thought it’d make 2012 more challenging and interesting to focus on something I’m not good at. Compassion I mean in the Buddhist sense – the ability to see through your own issues and feelings enough to understand what someone else is going through and provide some kind of legitimate help. One of the greatest dangers of social media, particularly as you start to develop any kind of following, is that you tend to attract like-minded people. As a result, you hear less and less about things you disagree with, things that challenge you, things that make you think. When all you hear is how awesome you are (whether you are or not) you face the great danger of your ego overwhelming any good work you’re providing. I have heard in the back of my mind from time to time the ugly, egotistical whisper that says, “this (person/place/thing/task) is below me”. It’s exactly at those moments when compassion can provide a much-needed bitch slap upside the head to bring reality back into the picture.

My task for 2012 is to be more rigorous and more disciplined in my own mind, guarding against that ever-growing danger.

So there you have it, my three words for 2012: story, restoration, compassion. Blog yours and leave a link in the comments!

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#re2011: Top and bottom 10 posts from my blog this year

Christopher S Penn — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 00:24:34 +0000

Beginning tomorrow, I’m starting a Twitter series until the end of the year called #re2011. It’ll be a replay of the top and bottom 10 posts from my blog as determined by Google Analytics. Each post will be tagged, indicating whether it’s in the top or bottom 10. At the conclusion of the series, we’ll have a wrap-up blog post with everything in one place. If you don’t follow me on Twitter, you can find me at @cspenn to see the updates every day.

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If you’re going to start with the Christmas music already…

Christopher S Penn — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 04:06:12 +0000

… may as well be the good stuff. One of my favorites, Sarah McLachlan’s Wintersong:

Click here to view the embedded video.

(available on Amazon)

Happy wintertime, everyone.

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Google Reader and the loss of serendipity

Christopher S Penn — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 12:12:46 +0000

One of the most critical losses to the blog reading community with the rollout of the new Google Reader is the loss of its internal sharing, something that many of us came to rely on for serendipity. Why? Because in many cases, other people in our Google Reader network found new blogs, new items to share, new and interesting perspectives through what our friends shared. With Reader’s new changes pushing everything to G+, it’s mighty hard now to see what your friends thought was important in the blogs they read daily.

Let’s take a brief moment to talk about the power of serendipity. Serendipity is loosely defined as finding something that you did not expect to find, a happy accident, and a pleasant surprise. Serendipity is more than just an accident, however – it’s a related accident. Here’s a good example: when you’re at the library, browsing at the shelf, trying to find the book you were looking for, you notice that there’s a series of books on either side of it that are even better than what you’d come looking for. That’s serendipity. Another simple example: you go to a conference to hear a popular speaker and wind up standing at the lunch line right next to them. Serendipity is sort of an accidental upgrade of your circumstances.

That’s what made Google Reader such a powerful engine of serendipity. You weren’t just finding random blog posts on random things. You were finding things that other people who you followed for a reason were finding, and it was all related.

So what do you do if you still want your daily dose of serendipity? On the consuming side, you’ll want to check out the topical categories at sites like Topsy and Alltop. Both of these provide you with some level of discovery, some level of serendipity. I’ve started using the Alltop marketing feed in Flipboard as a way to randomly find related items, and it’s better than nothing.

On the publishing side, you’ve got a few options if you want to help encourage serendipity. On Twitter, I publish a feed every morning of the top 5 items that I thought were worth paying attention to called #the5. You can monitor this simply by searching for #the5 in Twitter search. I also publish a weekly newsletter that you can subscribe to which will round up and wrap up the week’s #the5 entries. You can also save and share items in Instapaper as well, and then permit Facebook, Twitter, or email followers to find your shared items that way.

Most of all? Share a blog you’re reading every week with your friends, by whatever your preferred sharing method is, but tell a friend about a blog you’re reading that you think they might not be (but should be). Your friends will get to know you, you’ll be fostering serendipity, and who knows? They might share something back that will change your morning reading list forever.

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On recycling blog posts

Christopher S Penn — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 13:30:40 +0000

I’ll gently disagree with Chris Brogan’s idea about recycling blog posts yesterday. Go read it if you haven’t.

Welcome back.

Here’s why this is a bad idea. Senior master instructor Ken Savage of the Winchendon Martial Arts Center likes to compare life to a wheel on a wagon. Each year, the wheel turns around and you’re back to where you started. What we often fail to take notice of is the distance that the wheel has traveled in that year. Each year, we’re further down the path than the year before. Each birthday that rolls around is another year of travel, and a lot happens in that year. You learn a lot. You change. You grow. The wagon is in a different place, too. The terrain is different, the environment is different.

If I write a blog post in, say 2008, about something “evergreen” and then just repost it as is or link it up without changing it, I’m giving short shrift not only to my readers, but also to myself. By doing that, I’m failing to acknowledge that a lot has happened in 3 turns of the wheel and who I am today in 2011 should have even more insight, even more value to add.

If you want to recycle older stuff, especially stuff with no interactions or comments on it, take just a couple of minutes to polish it up, rewrite parts that have changed, and add in anything that you’ve gained from your experiences as the wheel has turned. Then take your old post, redirect it to preserve any inbound link juice, and let the world know about your newer, more updated perspective on things.

When you think about it in terms of real world recycling, the exact same thing happens. The old is crushed into raw materials, melted down, impurities extracted, and then reformed into something new. Don’t just hand someone a “used bottle” blog post – truly recycle it and give them something fresh.

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Finding connections in blog comments

Christopher S Penn — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 13:18:44 +0000

Borrowing an idea from Tom Webster‘s social media monitoring, let’s take a look at your blog’s comments today.

Start with WordPress (any blogging software will do, however). Open up your comments section and look at only approved comments, as I assume you de-spam your comments regularly before approving them.

Open up your text editor of choice and begin copying and pasting the last 10 pages of comments into it. If you’re feeling more sophisticated than copy/paste, open up MySQL and do an export of the post text column only to simplify the next steps.

Dedupe it if your software allows you to dedupe by line. Remove any obvious formatting or data-only lines and you should be left with a large text file of your recent blog comments.

Now fire up Wordle and feed this large chunk of text into it:

Two questions for you:

1. Do the largest words in the cloud express an intended focus of your blogging? That is, if you blog about marketing or social media, are the comments you’ve received indicative of that? If not, your content may be somewhat off target.

2. Are there words or word associations in the cloud that you didn’t expect to find in there? For example, in my cloud above, I found that people was unusually prominent and it turns out that the word people is used very heavily when referencing how to build social networks like Google+.

Got a blogger you respect? Run their comments through the same mechanism and see if you have anything in common with their audience. Here, for example, is Chris Brogan:

So, what are people saying about your blog posts?

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Disaster Rice Tabbouleh

Christopher S Penn — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 00:30:15 +0000

One of the best disaster prep foods I’ve always found to be reliable is good ol’ brown rice. It’s dense, full of nutrition, keeps reasonably well (not as good as white rice, but you sacrifice nutrition for longevity), and is relatively easy to make, especially with a rice cooker.

In advance of Hurricane Irene, in addition to all the other sensible disaster prep stuff, I put on an extra large pot of rice as well. Now that the hurricane has blown through, I have a lot of cooked rice on my hands. Luckily, there’s a great rice salad that you can use the leftovers with, using ingredients familiar to anyone who knows the middle Eastern dish tabbouleh.

Ingredients

1 large pot of cooked brown rice
1 large cucumber
2 medium onions (medium = tennis ball size)
1 medium carrot
Basil
1 teaspoon Salt
1/2 teaspoon Pepper
1/4-1/2 cup lemon juice
Jalapeno sauce or other spicy sauce

Directions

Chop up all the vegetables into small cubes.
Mix in a large bowl with the rice.
Add in the rest of the ingredients except the jalapeno sauce.
Stir.
Add in jalapeno sauce to preferred spicyness.
Let sit overnight.
Eat.

This makes as little or as much rice salad as you want. It’s very tasty and super easy to serve. It’s best cold, which also means that it’s great for taking to work. It works on the same principles as bulgur wheat, so any recipe for tabbouleh can also use brown rice instead of the wheat.

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How to market your WordPress blog

Christopher S Penn — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 17:21:28 +0000

I’m delighted and excited to share some of my ideas, strategies, tips, tools, and methods for marketing your WordPress blog at Boston’s WordCamp event. As I anticipate a fair number of people and A/V conditions that are always less optimal than we’d like, I’m providing the mindmap for the session in advance here, so that if you’re attending (or even if you’re just curious), you can follow along on your own device and not have to rely on squinting at the screen.

Click the image for larger versions.

Would you like a high resolution version you can download and print out? Click here for the high-res PDF.

One cautionary note: without hearing the presentation that goes with the map, there’s a good chance some stuff won’t make sense. If you’d like to hear the full presentation, make sure you request the next marketing conference you attend to book me to speak and ask for this presentation to be a session at the event.

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How to distill content curation for real impact

Christopher S Penn — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 12:51:16 +0000

How do you cope with the flood of information that swamps your inbox, blog reader, and mobile device every day?

How do you find and isolate all the good stuff, separate the wheat from the chaff, and use the information you’re receiving to actually move the needle?

The same way that you get the good stuff out of crude oil, weak brews, and perfume herbs: distillation. If you slept through high school chemistry class (or were interested in an entirely different kind of chemistry, as many of my peers were), distillation is the process of heating a raw material to extract a chemical based on its boiling point, then condensing the distilled product separately. Cognac, for example, is distilled wine from high-quality ugni blanc grapes. It’s distilled twice in copper pots, then aged for two years before being sold for consumption.

The same process that works for cognac works for content curation. It’s not enough just to subscribe to a bunch of blogs and read a bunch of tweets, not if you want to take all of the information you receive daily and make it useful. Here’s the process I use on a daily and weekly basis; feel free to modify or adapt it for your own needs.

I start every day with my blog reader on the iPad. I’ve subscribed to about 2500 different blogs across a spectrum of topics, and each day I hit the main topic areas, such as economics, marketing, social media, development, etc. I skim through rapidly, looking for bits of information and data that catch my eye, read into articles that do, and then share them via Google Reader. I do this specifically on the iPad because it lets me focus better on just reading the news with no other distractions.

If that were all I did, I’d still be swamped with information, since I share 20-30 different articles a day, if not more. The first distillation pass is what I cull out for #the5 on Twitter every day. Of those 20-30 articles, which 5 of them are the most worth sharing? Some days, that’s easy. Some days, that’s a very tough call. But forcing myself to distill out only 5 different pieces of information makes me focus on the stuff that’s truly important to me, stuff that I’d want to really remember. One of my general rules of thumb for stuff in #the5 is that if I didn’t learn something, I don’t share it.

The second pass of distillation occurs weekly, as I prep each Tuesday night for a recording of Marketing Over Coffee. I actually subscribe to my own #the5 tweets as a separate RSS feed so that I can see just the most important articles of the week that I thought were good enough to share. I’ll star key items in that feed so that I have a very compact list of stuff that should be headline discussion topics and then bring those with me every Wednesday morning when John Wall and I record the show.

The final stage of distillation, the stage where I know something has got to be kept or else, is when I take distilled items out of this process and put them into reference tools like Evernote or Instapaper, ensuring that I have them on hand for when I need to reference them later.

This three-phase process wasn’t automatic or something immediately contrived. It just evolved that way as the amount of information thrown at me increased, and this was a handy way of filtering it down until only the gems were left. It’s probably not right for you and your information processing style, but I hope it gives you some ideas and inspires you to try multiple levels of content curation to distill out the things that you really need or want to remember and learn.

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Christopher S. Penn : Awaken Your Superhero » Blogging

Top and bottom 10 blog posts of 2011

Three Words for 2012

#re2011: Top and bottom 10 posts from my blog this year

If you’re going to start with the Christmas music already…

Google Reader and the loss of serendipity

On recycling blog posts

Finding connections in blog comments

Disaster Rice Tabbouleh

How to market your WordPress blog

How to distill content curation for real impact