Daily Archives: July 23, 2009
How do I blog?
Here’s what a reader mailed me:
I want to know how you decide what to write about (sorry , sounds silly!) ahnd how do you draw the line on how much of yourself comes through the blog and how much of the professional ‘you’ comes through. I want to begin blogging too and while there is no dearth of topics in today’s world, I am very hesitant to start! Any advice?
This is what I replied:
Well there are three main ways I decide what to write about:
1. Thoughts that strike me during the day and if they are still there in the evening – I know it’s important for me to express it 
2. What the other HR bloggers are blogging about – and if I have something new to add to it
3. Some newsworthy events in my domain area Well when one is expressing an opinion – of course there is one’s own thoughts, values getting expressed, and I don’t even try to hide it. My blog is not a news blog, so I don’t strive for objectiveness
If you have a point of view and a story to tell – just start blogging!
Small Businesses Marketing via Twitter
For many mom-and-pop shops with no ad budget, Twitter has become their sole means of marketing. It is far easier to set up and update a Twitter account than to maintain a Web page. And because small-business owners tend to work at the cash register, not in a cubicle in the marketing department, Twitter’s intimacy suits them well.
“We think of these social media tools as being in the realm of the sophisticated, multiplatform marketers like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, but a lot of these supersmall businesses are gravitating toward them because they are accessible, free and very simple,” said Greg Sterling, an analyst who studies the Internet’s influence on shopping and local businesses.
Small businesses typically get more than half of their customers through word of mouth, he said, and Twitter is the digital manifestation of that. Twitter users broadcast messages of up to 140 characters in length, and the culture of the service encourages people to spread news to friends in their own network.
Social media and social marketplaces (like Amazon) gave rise to the Long Tail phenomenon.
No wonder it suits small and medium businesses to market themselves using Twitter. I wonder how much longer it will take for them to discover friendfeed and posterous too
