Our talk turned to etiquette in social media .. what is proper and politie in the digital world. Do we still need to remember our manners? The Divas round the table kindly agreed to share their thoughts.
]]>Our talk turned to etiquette in social media .. what is proper and politie in the digital world. Do we still need to remember our manners? The Divas round the table kindly agreed to share their thoughts.
What does social media manners mean to you? Is this a topic that we should even consider?
]]>In the second mini interview with the panelists, Remi Adams, director of public relations for Homestead Technologies encourages you to ask a few questions before you launch a corporate blog.
Toby: We are speaking at the BlogHer Business Conference on the panel "Should You Blog?" The panel is part of the track "How Do I Get It Right the First Time?" How can you get a corporate blog right the first time?
Remi: Make sure that the purpose of the blog is well thought out before embarking upon it. What’s the point of the blog? Who is the audience? How will it be used? Who is writing it and in what voice? What information will be divulged and will that information need to be cleared with anyone within the company? These are just a few of the questions people should ask themselves before creating a corporate blog. Also, ask yourself a question people rarely ask of themselves: Do you have the time or resources to create content?
Toby: The blog, CEO Unplugged
]]>In the second mini interview with the panelists, Remi Adams, director of public relations for Homestead Technologies encourages you to ask a few questions before you launch a corporate blog.
Toby: We are speaking at the BlogHer Business Conference on the panel "Should You Blog?" The panel is part of the track "How Do I Get It Right the First Time?" How can you get a corporate blog right the first time?
Remi: Make sure that the purpose of the blog is well thought out before embarking upon it. What’s the point of the blog? Who is the audience? How will it be used? Who is writing it and in what voice? What information will be divulged and will that information need to be cleared with anyone within the company? These are just a few of the questions people should ask themselves before creating a corporate blog. Also, ask yourself a question people rarely ask of themselves: Do you have the time or resources to create content?
Toby: The blog, CEO Unplugged
, is written by the Justin Kitch who is the founder and CEO of Homestead .. and your boss. What advice would you give marketers who are considering encouraging their CEO to take a step into social media and launch a blog?
Remi: I think a good question to ask is whether or not the CEO has a clear focus, and if blogging as a medium is a good one for that person as a communicator. Some people excel at public speaking; others’ are much more interesting and persuasive as writers. Every medium does not speak to the talents of every person, and I think that since blogs are so accessible and easy to create, people don’t view them as they would any other PR or marketing opportunity.
I wouldn’t encourage every CEO to act as a company spokesperson, if they wouldn’t shine in that role on behalf of their company; and the same should be true of the CEO who would like to author a corporate blog. In many cases, CEO’s divorce themselves of the corporate blog and devote their time to writing a personal blog so that they can express their personal opinion more freely.
Toby: What is your personal goal for attendees to take away from our BlogHer Business panel "conversation?"
Remi: I would like attendees to ask themselves a few personal questions before establishing their corporate blogs. There are certainly no right or wrong answers; merely questions that will help people better define their individual paths.
If you've enjoyed the interview with Remi Adams, catch the mini interview
with Penelope Trunk.
Toby, also blogs at Diva Marketing
.
]]>First up is Penelope Trunk, columnist for the Boston Globe and Yahoo! Finance. Penelope blogs at Brazen Careerist
]]>First up is Penelope Trunk, columnist for the Boston Globe and Yahoo! Finance. Penelope blogs at Brazen Careerist
Toby: We are speaking at the BlogHer Business Conference on the panel "Should You Blog?" The panel is part of the track "How Do I Get It Right the First Time?" In the new social media world how you can build relationships with the media right the first time?
Penelope: A very effective way to get my attention is to link to my blog or comment on my blog. There are a million bloggers in the world, and the first on the list of new blogs I'll look at will be those somehow connected to my own community. After a few blog-based interactions, I feel like I know you a little. Then, when you approach me and say, "Will you write about this? I want to get the word out?" I'm more likely to say yes.
A pitch from a blogger is more straightforward than a pitch from a publicist. A blogger usually emails and says, " Here I am!" There is no fancy pitch. This is a fine way to approach me as a blogger. However if a random publicist approached me this way, for example, to promote a book from a mainstream publisher, I'd probably think there's something wrong with the book. I expect a different pitch from someone who is not a blogger. This is probably not fair and not rational, but at least I'm being honest.
Toby: Your column in the Boston Globe focuses on career advice. Is a "brand is me" blog a good idea for someone in a job search mode? If you agree what type of content would help close the deal a little faster? If you disagree, what harm would it do?
Penelope:A blog can make the difference between a mediocre career and a get-to-do-all-the-fun-stuff career. But this means thinking about blogging and job hunting with a more contemporary bent.
To blog merely to get a job strikes me as disingenuous. It's similar to calling up people in your network only when you need a job. That's not really networking, that's just asking for favors.
Blogging is about sharing ideas with a community. A successful blog has to be about connecting with a community. Someone who is blogging just to get a job probably will not engage people in a way that makes the blog relevant to a community. So maybe the person should write white papers instead, and publish them on a web site -- that's a way to get your ideas across without pretending to link into a community.
Increasingly, job hunting is a continuous process that never ends. People are changing jobs a lot more often than they used to. Young people change jobs more than every two years. At any given time 70% of workers are looking for jobs. So instead of treating a job hunt like an event, and blogging for that moment, think about maintaining a blog as something you do always, to keep your career vibrant.
A column I wrote lists all the things you can do for your career by maintaining a blog. I actually was not a blogger when I wrote this column. But this column is what made me realize I needed to start blogging in order to keep my career relevant.
I also think there are career benefits to blogging periodically. But the benefits are not as big. (A postthat Penelope wrote includes more information.)
Toby: What is your personal goal for attendees to take away from our BlogHer Business panel "conversation?"
Penelope: I want people to know that the mainstream press is really interested in quoting bloggers. But if the journalists don't read blogs every day (which they don't), it's really hard to find bloggers to quote.
This is because there is no good way to search for blogs. For example, I was looking for a blogger to quote about the funeral industry. And the first blog that came up in my google search was someone who posted about how hard it was to find someone blogging about the funeral industry. Absurd.
Also, offline media has established ways to measure credibility. These rules do not apply to the blogsphere, so many print journalists do not know how to pick out the credible bloggers from a long list of relevant blogs.
Because of these two problems, it's very hard for a lot of mainstream journalists to quote bloggers, even thought they want to. Which means that if you approach the mainstream media as a blogger with established credibility, you will have to compete with fewer outlets in order to get quoted.
I find this is true in places like PRleads as well. I learned this the hard way. My book is coming out in May, and it's called Brazen Careerist -- the same title of my blog. I have responded to plenty of queries from journalists. I described myself as a blogger and an author, and the journalist has printed the blog name instead of the book name. Not great for my book publicity, but evidence that journalists are choosing to quote bloggers over authors.
Toby, also blogs at Diva Marketing
.
]]>Elisa and I chatted about blogs, women in social media and the challenges and opportunities facing the BlogHer founders - Elisa Camahort, Jory Des Jarden and Lisa Stone - as they build an organization that is focused on women in social media. Elisa agreed to recreate our conversation.
Toby - Let’s step back in time to 2005. How in the world did you pull off the 2005 BlogHer Conference with no infrastructure, when you, Jory and Lisa were holding down full-time jobs and with minimum funding?
Elisa - Because of the community. Don’t get me wrong, Lisa, Jory and I worked like madwomen…but at every step of the way when we asked for help, someone stepped up to deliver. The women’s blogging community didn’t respond to the idea of a BlogHer Conference with a passive “entertain me†attitude. On the contrary, they reacted with an active “What can I do?†spirit. Volunteerism contributed to every aspect of the conference. We like to call it “do-ocracy.†(More on that concept is here: http://www.blogher.com/about-blogher-conference-06)
Toby - Flash forward to 2007, BlogHer is now the premier online community for women bloggers, an ad network and not one but two conferences are planned for this year. What is the difference between the two conferences?
Elisa - Thanks for the kind compliment Toby. The BlogHer ‘07 Conference this July in Chicago will be the next generation of the annual conference we’ve had in Silicon Valley in ’05 and ’06. It’s for all women who are interested in blogging, be they as bloggers, bloggers-to-be, or blog readers, regardless of topic or focus. We’ll continue to have the diverse schedule of sessions and events we’ve had, covering everything from the highly personal to the politically charged to the purely professional.
We’ll continue to promote do-ocracy, and look for ways to expand that empowered do-it-yourself approach beyond the Birds of a Feather sessions and Room of Your Own tracks. And we’ll continue to help all women to attend by heavily subsidizing the conference registration fee and feeding people!
BlogHer Business is our inaugural topic-focused event. Essentially we took the Business track from BlogHer and decided to expand it. Lisa, Jory and I are were all heavily involved with business blogging and helping businesses to grok social media long before we formed BlogHer, so this was a natural first focus area for us.
Lisa helped launch such blog networks as Law.com and Glam.com. Jory helped launch the ThirdAge blog network and consulted for such companies as Pluck and Rojo. I was an early business blogger, blogging for clients on topics as varied as healthcare, theatre and Internet trends. (I wrote for five client blogs at one time.)
We also had been to multiple business-related blogging conferences and felt we could add value in this arena. We consider BlogHer Business to be a “deeper dive†into a part of Blogher’s overall agenda. And in future we hope to expand the kind of deeper dives we make. BlogHer Tech? BlogHer Election ‘08? BlogHer Arts & Crafts? BlogHer Finance? We expect the community will point us in the directions to go.
Toby - Does a separate conference for business bloggers have anything to do with the buzz last summer about mommy bloggers and business bloggers having different interests?
Elisa - Actually, no. As I said, we’re not dropping business topics from the annual event at all. We’re just digging deeper. It’s an incredibly rich and deep topic area. The BlogHer annual event is about finding common ground and celebrating our differences. And promoting one another. And validating quality work and writing, no matter its subject matter. If anything, we’re figuring out how to address our greater community’s divergent interests head-on and see what we can learn from unexpected sources.
Toby - Why the steep price increase for the NYC conference?
Elisa - It might be easier to explain how the annual event prices are kept low. And why we want to continue to do so. Lots of the people who attend the annual event aren’t blogging as part of any business or job. They can’t expense it to anyone or deduct the trip at tax time. It’s pure out-of-pocket expense…it is really a luxury for a lot of folks. So, if we keep the registration fee low, if we feed you all day, if we try to find hotel options that are affordable…or at least can easily support room-sharing, then we can make sure that we can accommodate, or rather be accommodated by more bloggers.
Toby - Let’s take a step into the future. How will you market BlogHer to ensure that you maintain the positioning and brand awareness that you’ve developed? In other words, how will you differentiate BlogHer from possible competitors?
Elisa - Jory Des Jarden, Lisa Stone and I are part of the community, and that’s what makes this brand tick. We are committed to continuing in partnership with our members – of BlogHer.org and BlogHerAds.com – and think that will do the trick.
Here’s how we interpret “partnershipâ€: We try to differentiate ourselves by our level of service and responsiveness. By the variety of experiences we offer, online and off. By the fact that we are about community…about helping all boats rise together. And by how personally we take every aspect of our business…including helping customers understand the blogger perspective. We are each bloggers, after all, I started out as a personal and political blogger, before becoming a business blogger.
Lisa is a journalist-turned-blogger focused on the media and politics. Jory is an author and identity blogger looking at work and life. By tapping into our passion about blogging and passion about our Mission… which is to create opportunities for education, exposure, community and economic empowerment for women bloggers.
We have big plans…to continue to improve the content and experience on BlogHer.org, to further expand our educational and conference endeavors,to continue to work with the community to create more of the opportunities that our Mission speaks to.
Our conversation was too long for this space. The full interview is in two parts on my blog Diva Marketing. Read about how Elisa, Lisa and Jory first met Part One: The BlogHer Back Story. Learn about what Elisa considers to be her biggest challenges and opportunities and fun as she continues her social media adventure in Part Two: BlogHer's Vision & Future Direction
]]>Susan Getgood is the "un-guide" of this session. Yvonne DiVita, Heather Sanders, Lori Taylor, Jody Devere, Average Jane, Stephanie Hendrik and I will share 5-minute mini case studies with you. We'll talk about what worked and what did not. For more information and the urls of the cases please check out this post: http://www.blogher.com/node/6506
]]>Susan Getgood is the "un-guide" of this session. Yvonne DiVita, Heather Sanders, Lori Taylor, Jody Devere, Average Jane, Stephanie Hendrik and I will share 5-minute mini case studies with you. We'll talk about what worked and what did not. For more information and the urls of the cases please check out this post: http://www.blogher.com/node/6506
But we don't stop at just telling our stories. To ensure that we remember all the great ideas we'll develop a check list of best practices that will help us take our biz blogs to the next level of success.
One very lucky participant will also take home a copy of Debbie Weil's new, hot, off the press "The Corporate Blogging Book." Actually, it won't even be hot off the press until August. Thank you kindly Debbie!
http://www.thecorporatebloggingbook.com/
I have a romanticized image of a hard working farmer that through lovin' the land, carefully tending her crops and not using chemical fertilizers or pesticides produces healthier, better tasting fruits and veggie. Needless to say, this type of TLC does not come cheap. However, many people are willing to pay a pretty premium for organic-foods, not only because they assume the food is better for you, but there's a feel good benefitin helping the small farmer.
]]>I have a romanticized image of a hard working farmer that through lovin' the land, carefully tending her crops and not using chemical fertilizers or pesticides produces healthier, better tasting fruits and veggie. Needless to say, this type of TLC does not come cheap. However, many people are willing to pay a pretty premium for organic-foods, not only because they assume the food is better for you, but there's a feel good benefitin helping the small farmer.
News Flash! The organic-foods market has turned in to Big Business. According to Nutrition Business Journal in 2006 organic-foods will generate approximately $15.5 billion. In 2005 sales were $13.8 billion up from $11.9 billion in 2004 and $3.6 billion in 1997. Taking care not to squish the tomatoes, main stream grocery chains are about to serve up their own branded organic salads.
The benefit is lower prices with more people able to enjoy organic-food. The down side is more competition for the small farmer. Danielle at foodmoniac.com has found an interesting way to support small farmers in her local community. She is joining a CSA.
What's a CSA? Glad you asked. A Community Supported Agriculture is a way for the food buying public to create a relationship with a farm and to receive a weekly basket of produce. By making a financial commitment to a farm, people become "members" (or "shareholders," or "subscribers") of the CSA. Definition from Local Harvest
Local Harvest includes a directory of CSAs as well as farmer markets. Read more about organic-foods, small farmers and grocery chains at SFGate.com.
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]]>Atlanta has wonderful Asian farmer's markets. Last weekend I discovered a new one and before I knew it, a visit was at the top of my "Saturday List."
]]>Atlanta has wonderful Asian farmer's markets. Last weekend I discovered a new one and before I knew it, a visit was at the top of my "Saturday List."
Wandering the isles of an international farmer's market the shopping experience becomes a mini travel excursion. This store was a blend of Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai and Mexican treats. Yes, ma'am I did say Mexican.
Easy to make Crispy Lettuce Cups from Rocket Bites(TM) is a perfect way to begin this menu inspired by my trip to the farmer's market. Praba lyer suggests a combination of ginger, carrots and green papaya drizzled with peanut and sweet chili that is served on the side.
For a main course let's go with a simple fish dish. Roasted Salmon and Asparagus, complements of Kitchen Parade that allows us to use the wonderful, fresh ingredients from the market; and the lemony-thyme sauce sounds absolutely refreshing.
Toast Point offers a perfect ending to a spring meal - Asian Pears with Saffron Sherry Ice Cream. The flavors of ginger and pears seem like they would tickle your palate. The ice cream is a perfect foil to the bite of the ginger. For the ice cream, I would suggest going the extra mile and either making homemade vanilla or buying a gourmet brand to use as the base. By the way, the Toast Point's retro design is really cute.
A few forthisias stems or some early blooming daffodils, in an interesting container, is a wonderful center piece. Or a try a few blossoms placed next to each setting to bring a little spring indoors.
Enjoy!
]]>I'm experimenting with a new direction for my 'beat' ... along the idea of "Special Meals For The Everyday." The thought is to build mini menus around a theme. The "everyday" could run from a Fourth of July celebration to a Wednesday night veg out veggie supper. As always, your ideas and feedback are welcomed and appreciated.
]]>I'm experimenting with a new direction for my 'beat' ... along the idea of "Special Meals For The Everyday." The thought is to build mini menus around a theme. The "everyday" could run from a Fourth of July celebration to a Wednesday night veg out veggie supper. As always, your ideas and feedback are welcomed and appreciated.
For me spring means a special family celebration meal. When I was a little girl I loved Passover...except when it fell on my birthday. Some how putting candles on an angel food or sponge cake just couldn't compete with "real" birthday cakes complete with butter, cream cheese frosting roses.
Too bad there weren't food blogs back then (don't ask when!). I've discovered the most yummy Passover sweets. Here's a Passover Dessert Menu that might even make up for not having those frosting roses!
Let's start with Cinnamon Cookies that sound light as a feather from It Is What It Is. Next for the chocolateholic a rich tort complements of My Mom's Recipes And More. My Mom's Recipe also links to a Toasted Hazelnut Cake with Sweet Chocolate Glaze. Hmmm, how about adding the chocolate glaze on the tort?
A few nibbles of candy would be a nice way to complete our menu. My Vegetarian Recipe Of The Day kindly shares an absolutely, magnificent, carmel matzoh crunch.
After this party, I'm thinking the next post should lean more towards salads!
]]>Now that you have an appreciation of how coffee is grown skip over to The Delicious Life to learn how to properly grind those precious beans. Hint: Stay far away from your food processor.
You're ready to try an absolutely decant coffee from Morning Coffee & Afternoon Tea - Caramel Kahlua.
And of course, good talk goes best with a great cup of java!
]]>Exploring The Silver Spoon and Blue Lotus
and show us how to really turn simple carrots into haute cuisine. The Fontina cheese in The Silver Spoon's Crema di Carote adds an elegant touch to this cream soup.
The Canadian girl, who is eating her way around Tokyo, shares a recipe for a sophisticated Japanese vegetable soup called Kenchin-jiru.
]]>Once only for the kindergarten set, Sex and the City helped elevate this childhood sweet, to a sophisticated adult dessert. At the Magnolia Bakery, Carrie et al devoured little cakes and talked about men, sex and life.
]]>Once only for the kindergarten set, Sex and the City helped elevate this childhood sweet, to a sophisticated adult dessert. At the Magnolia Bakery, Carrie et al devoured little cakes and talked about men, sex and life.
she craves blogs about her cocktails and cupcakes birthday party. It was def adults only with guests eating Margaritaville cupcakes followed by salty Margarita chasers. All Cupcakes, All The Time has wonderful photos and more recipes. Those little cakes are not just for the kids anymore!
]]>When was the last time you explored your own neighborhood for a hidden delight? I challenge you to turn a corner...you just might find a new favorite restaurant. If you do...let me know!
]]>In the Italian countryside, Ribollita, a black cabbage soup, is a winter standard. Delicious Destination's guest blogger, Tuscan B&B owner Simonetta, shares a "very old recipe from the countryside." This hearty soup is served over toast bread. Add a salad and a sweet for dessert and you have a wonderful comfort meal that is simple but elegant.
]]>In the Italian countryside, Ribollita, a black cabbage soup, is a winter standard. Delicious Destination's guest blogger, Tuscan B&B owner Simonetta, shares a "very old recipe from the countryside." This hearty soup is served over toast bread. Add a salad and a sweet for dessert and you have a wonderful comfort meal that is simple but elegant.
]]>It's customary to serve a fish dish on New Year's eve and Salui's Food has an Indo-Chinese Spiced Fish Fillet recipe that is sure to bring smiles from your friends and inspire their loyalty to come back for more!
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