Are America’s fastest-growing companies shifting away from blogging as a primary social media platform?  ”Maybe” could be a conclusion based on new research examining the INC 500 from The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts.

For the first time in the five years that this research has been conducted, the use of blogging declined. Blogging had been steadily climbing as a corporate communications tool — 19% of the INC 500 blogged in 2007, 39% in 2008, 45% in 2009, 50% in 2010 and just 37% last year.

But there is an element of mystery here.  Despite the decline, blogging was considered the most “successful” social media platform for the fourth consecutive year!  In addition, among those companies not blogging, 62 percent are considering adding a blog.

How can we reconcile this seemingly inconsistent data?  Is corporate blogging really declining? I have a theory that would conclude “no,” but before I explain my rational, let’s look at a few more interesting trends from this study:

Facebook and LinkedIn lead the way. For the first time, the platform most utilized by the Inc. 500 is Facebook with 74% of companies using it. Virtually tied at 73% is the adoption of the professional network, LinkedIn.  As you can see in the graph above, video and podcasting use declined in this period. The researchers theorized that companies are spending more time on Facebook at the expense of blogs and video.

Social media tools are seen as important for company goals. 90% of responding INC 500 executives report that social media tools are important for brand awareness and company reputation. 88% see these tools as important for generating web traffic and 81% find them important for lead generation. 73% say that social media tools are important for customer support programs.

Social media investments will rise.  25% of the respondents said they plan to keep their social media budget the same in 2012, and 71% plan to increase their investment by 20% or more. Just one company had a plan to decrease the social media marketing budget.

Monitoring the social media buzz levels off. The 2011 study shows 68% of companies are using social media monitoring tools, down from 70% in 2010, which was the highest percentage of the past 5 years. Only 24% of the companies have a formal social media policy.

Measurement is inconsistent.  When asked how they measured the effectiveness of their social media efforts, executives reported using fans, followers and supporters (26%), web traffic (25%), lead generation (16%), reduced cost of customer support (10%), the value of sales generated through social media programs (7%).

The work is being handled inside. Executives were asked how social media resource needs were filled in their companies. Two-thirds of the companies reported retraining or repositioning existing employees to handle their social media efforts, 10% use external consultants or agencies, 7% have made new hires specifically for their social media efforts.

Are company blogs really declining?

If you just read the headline of this study and looked at the graph at the top of this blog post, you would be hearing a death knell for blogging. But let’s not bury blogging so fast. Let’s apply a little critical reasoning to this study …

• It is important to consider that the data presented by the university researchers is not an apples-to-apples comparison. There is a tremendous “churn” of companies on the INC list. In fact, from 2007 when the survey started to 2011, the list of companies has almost completely changed.
• The authors admit that these changes have impacted the overall statistics in “distinct ways.” Most notably, there has been an increase in companies providing Government Services (a result of “Obama administration initiatives”). The researchers state that Government Services companies are among the least likely companies to blog.  So in 2011, many traditional “blogging companies” were replaced on the list by companies that are unlikely to have blogs.  If the researchers surveyed the exact same sample group, blogging levels may have even gone up in 2011.
• Also notable is that more than 60 percent of the companies on the INC 500 list did not exist in 2005. It is possible that these start-ups are not moving away from blogging to Facebook as the authors surmised.  I think a more likely scenario is that these young companies are STARTING with Facebook because the entry barriers are so low compared to blogging. This would reconcile the curious fact that the companies with blogs see them as successful (why would they quit?) and that most companies who are not blogging plan to do so.
• Finally, another possible cause of the strange drop is sampling error. Only 34% of the INC 500 companies responded to the survey.  Within the stated sampling errors, it is possible to conclude that the 2010 data and 2011 data are nearly identical.

At this time each year I reflect on what has happened on {grow}.  After 274 posts, did this blog and its community make a difference? Did it move ahead?

Here are some the aspects of {grow} that I hope had the biggest impact this year. You can be the judge if it made a difference in your life, your outlook, and your business.

Innovations

I pushed the blog in four new directions in an effort to create diverse, compelling and entertaining content.

1) Paid contributing columnists.  I put my money where my mouth is and took a stand by ending this practice of bloggers building their businesses on the backs of others by expecting free content.  I’m sure you’ll agree Neicole Crepeau, Stanford Smith, Srivanos Rao, Robert Dempsey and Steve Goldner consistently knocked it out of the park with their superb content. Neicole’s post “Are We Killing Our Customers With Engagement” was one of the most-viewed post of the year!

2) {growtoons} On May 6, the first of the weekly social media cartoons was introduced with Joey Strawn‘s  Desperate Measures.  A few months later, Kacy Maxwell joined the team.  This innovation adds an element of fun and unique social media commentary. After all, how else could you poke fun at Chris Brogan’s sycophantic fans and get away with it?

3) New perspectives.  I’m passionate about showcasing fresh, deserving voices on {grow}. I featured 40 different guest contributors this year, including some that I flat-out disagreed with! Probably my favorite contribution was Jon Buscall’s wonderful case study, How 20 High School Students Ignited a Social Media Success.  Celebrating others is the most rewarding part of blogging.

4) Video.  In 2011 I had twice as many video blogs as all previous years combined. It’s still not my preferred medium but it gave me the opportunity to shine the light on some incredible people I met throughout the year, including Helen Brown, who provided an interesting view of The Google Filter Bubble.

Darkness on the Edge of Town

In many ways, 2011 was a very disturbing year.  I unwittingly hosted a ghost post scandal.  My {grow} friends Steven Parker and Imad Naffa died. SEO tricksters continued to push past digital marketing ethical boundaries. Social media privacy problems made me wonder where all this is heading. A friend had her career destroyed by social media. And I am still struggling with the suicide death of my friend Trey Pennington.  All of this was getting me down and it was coming through in the tone of the blog.  And then something amazing happened.  Hope showed up in a most unexpected place!

Breakthrough content

As an educator, I try to use this forum to get people to think about social media and its context in new ways.  Ten posts that turned the thinking around included:

1. The World’s Best Company Blogs
2. The World’s Best Non-Profit Blogs
3. Why the Economics of Blogging are Broken
4. Turning PowerPoint slides into Social Media Gold
5. How Social Media is Transforming Government
6. Finding the Balance Between Personal and Professional on Twitter
7. Marketing, Journalism and Truth as Competitive Advantage
8. The Business Case for Facebook, In One Sentence
9. A Process to Connect Social Media, Content Marketing and Sales
10. Why Klout Matters. A Lot.

Five Big Favorites

As I scanned through the year’s work here on {grow}, I came across a few special posts that made me smile and think, “Yes, that was a good one.”  This year, I received nearly 10,000 comments on {grow} and many of them were generated by these five favorite posts:

Why the Social Media Elite Are Ignoring Us? — It started out as a simple question but 2,000 tweets and more than 200 comments later it stands out as a blog post that helped put social media success in a rational context.

The Making of a Social Media Slut — Sometimes blog posts come from the most unexpected sources. I had lunch with a friend who was looking for a job and in a moment of weakness suggested she should watch her Klout score. In less than 15 minutes I had written a post and ignited a debate!

For Google, the Party is Over Before It Starts — I went against the grain and predicted that Google+ would not be the Facebook killer all the social media geeks predicted. This is the only blog post I have written that received more comments than tweets. Earlier in the year I also went against convention by stating that Quora (and the Quor-gasm!) was not the salvation everybody was saying it was and that QR Codes are doomed.  Time will tell … but I still think I’m right in all three cases!

How Blogging Changed a Life — This was a difficult post.  I like it because it represents the biggest personal risk of the year.  Through my posts and speeches I challenge others to push themselves. In this one, I am taking my own medicine.

On Twitter No One Can Hear You Scream – This is my favorite post of 2011 because it combined all five elements of a perfect blog post: snappy headline, entertaining content, original thinking, crisp writing, and a personal perspective. Plus I thought the illustration was funny!

So there you have it. A retrospective of 2011.  If you’ve made it this far, congratulations and thank you … you are a true {grow} fan!!

As always, I would cherish your thoughts and observations on this community and how I can help push it forward in 2012. Thank you!

Triberr is a new platform that bands together like-minded bloggers who support each other by tweeting worthy posts. I’ve participated in a limited way because up until now, the application was misguided, political and melodramatic.

The first problem was auto-tweeting. Not just auto-tweeting, but an expectation or even a REQUIREMENT for auto-tweeting other tribe-member posts. I created my own little resistance movement and was nearly thrown out of tribes a time or two but I’m happy to say that Triberr now has NO auto-tweeting. So I’m staying.

The second problem was/is the politics. For some tribe members there is a strong entitlement mentality that since your post gets tweeted, you should always return the favor.  Which I do … unless the blog posts aren’t very good or are blatantly self-promotional.  Everything you do and say reflects on your “brand.”  You are what you tweet. And part of my brand is “quality content” so I’ve had to ignore some barbs from people who I would happily tweet if their content was aligned with what my audience comes to expect from me.

Now let’s talk about the upside to Triberr and why you should consider this interesting innovation.

Fresh voices. I’ve been introduced to new bloggers like Eric Wittlake, Douglas Idugboe, Michael Brenner, Pam Moore, and many more who are delivering AMAZING content. I love almost everything they write and I enjoy sharing their insights with my audience. And many of these new connections are also becoming friends and even business associates.

Meaningful traffic.  I am not a big advocate of driving blog “traffic” as a goal. What does that really do for you if you are trying to build a business?  However, Triberr has boosted my blog visitors by about 7 percent and I suspect that many of these new readers are sticking around and becoming regular readers because the tweets of my posts are coming from other trusted bloggers.

Feedback. Triberr provides some nice analytics about how your posts perform in the blogosphere.  In a very real way, tribe member “tweets” equate to votes. When I write a post and knock it out of the park, the Triberr community clearly rewards me for it. If I put something out there that gets a reaction of “meh,” I usually learn something that will help me be a better blogger next time. So Triberr has been a bit of a Darwinian catalyst for continuous improvement.

It solves a problem. There is a chronic unfairness about the blogosphere. Many bloggers are popular simply because they were there first. They may not be the most creative or talented, but their blogs are at the top of the pile because they have so many followers, so many backlinks, and so much social proof. There is one blog in the AdAge Top 100 that has not been updated since 2009.  So it is literally impossible for new voices to crack into the elite league because of this permanent disadvantage.  I really hate this aspect of the social web. There is a blogging glass ceiling and mediocrity is institutionalized.

Triberr helps combat this problem by supporting worthy new voices.  Now that auto-tweeting is over, it is a true meritocracy.  If you do good work and help others doing good work, you will be rewarded. That’s the way it should be.  We may not have 100,000 followers, but with the support of an engaged group of supporters, we can make a dent and at least promote deserving work from people who are not considered A-Listers

I think Triberr has evolved to the point where it’s now focused on the right things and founders Dino Dogan and Dan Cristo continue to innovate and add cool new features at a breakneck pace.  If you’re trying to break through the clutter, meet new friends, and learn to be a better blogger, you should give it a try.  One challenge is you need an invitation to join (and my tribes are complete). But there are message boards with people looking for bloggers to add to the mix, or you can start your own tribe. Check it out.

Many passionate and hardworking social business operatives are making a business-killing mistake.

Proud of their impressive Twitter followings, Facebook crowds and Klout scores they are lulled into a false sense of security.

The rude awakening often comes when they try promoting their product to their audience. Suddenly, their enthusiastic following vanishes into thin air leaving behind crickets and one or two “mercy” sales.

Their error is simple. They have invested too much time engaging their peers and have overlooked their customers in the process. This social rut is easy to fall into, let’s see if you are in danger of falling into it yourself.

Pop Quiz:

• Do you spend hours trading @mentions with people with profiles identical to your own?
• Do you struggle to remember the Twitter handle of a customer but can rattle the usernames of 5 social media A-Listers in 5 seconds flat?
• Are you afraid that promoting your product would offend 90% of your followers and blog readers?
• Are you hoping that your followers will share their audience with you when the time is right?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions then you are in danger of being popular and broke.

But, don’t beat yourself up. I’ve been in the exact same rut. In fact, I started and shuttered two blogs before I realized that being social is different than “Social Business.”  Knowing the difference is critical to your success.

This is How Social Business Works

The world of Social Business is like your typical high school cafeteria.

Take a second to remember lunch hour.

Striding into the cafeteria you quickly made dozens of “life and death” social decisions. Sit with your friends? Invite the new kid to your table? Introduce yourself to the Student Government crowd or take a risk with the Jocks?

Depending on your social goals: getting a prom date, finding the best parties, not getting hassled on the school bus, you picked your “community.’

As a hormone happy teenager, I should have sat with crowd most likely to attract the cheerleaders’ attention!

Instead, I spent my time, dreaming and drooling from afar with the chess club geeks. My buddies were “Stand By Me” cool. We encouraged each other. We had our own language and didn’t miss an opportunity to hang out on Friday night.

But, my buddies rarely helped me get a date.

It’s easy to make the same mistake on social media.

Sure, it’s comforting and safe to hang out with people with similar interests. But if you are in business, you need to sit with a different crowd – your prospects.

Why Do We Get Trapped Selling to Our Navel?

It’s easy. We go to a popular conference in the name of research and networking. We meet some cool folks, share some raucous memories and head home snug in our mental rug.

Meanwhile, not one new person with cash and a purpose has been introduced to our blog. Oops. Not one person with signing authority has started to follow our Twitter account. Double oops.

Here’s the tough love. You should be networking and masterminding with professionals who share similar goals. You should not build your business on these comfortable get-togethers.

If you do, then you are needlessly delaying your success. You should immediately take a frank look at your activities and focus them on finding and attracting quality prospects to your blog.

How to Find Your Prospect’s Social Watering Holes

Finding prospects is a different game.

By nature, prospects don’t want to be found. They lurk in the shadows only making an appearance when they can’t afford to stay anonymous anymore. When they do step into the light they sign-up for email newsletters, register for webinar, or put you on the RFP list. Retweeting, commenting, and liking isn’t their style.

Like a lion on the Serengeti your best bet is to find watering holes, where your prospects gather to network, trade advice, and share resources. The watering hole location is different for every industry and prospect type:

• C-Level Executives read top-shelf trade publications dedicated to their profession. Sites like the Harvard Business Review is a likely watering hole. Comments and guest post gigs can give you instant visibility with this crowd.
• Passionate hobbyists hang out in niche-forums where they exchange tips and compete for social credibility. Joining these forums and being a resource for new members while discreetly promoting your expertise is a winning strategy.
• Micropreneurs and service professionals like attorneys, home appraisers, coffee shop proprietors and insurance agents often run in packs. You can spot them congregating around LinkedIn Groups or following one-another on Quora. Answering questions on LinkedIn, creating niche-specific twitter lists on Listorious, and hosting free webinars never fails to attract their attention.

It Will Be Tough (but profitable)

By the way, if you blog solely for pleasure then hang out with whoever you wish.

But, If you need to show results for the time you spend on the social web then get serious about sitting with your prospects.

Make sense? What are your social business strategies for finding and attracting prospects?

Stanford Smith obsesses about how to get passionate people’s blogs noticed and promoted at Pushing Social, except when he’s chasing large mouth bass.

I rarely do tech reviews but I wanted to provide my experiences with three recent test drives, Microsoft 365, Kyoo and the controversial new Triberr application.

Microsoft 365

I have really been looking forward to this cloud-based office productivity application.

As a small business owner, putting my office management and document suite into the cloud can solve a lot of problems. I use a variety of access points — laptop, desktop, smart phone and iPad.  I’m tired of all the syncing and not syncing and this is the future of efficient business management and communication.

The price is really sweet. I can get all the basic functionality for $6/month, This includes web conferencing, which I am currently shelling our $49/month to achieve through Citrix. It’s worth the price of admission just for that.  The basic Outlook functionality works great and office tools like Excel and PowerPoint offer most of the great features of the original.

And for that price, I am thinking of bringing all my freelance partners together under the same Sharepoint umbrella offered in this suite. Hey, I can act like a big company now.

It is going to take some time to really optimize this and learn how to leverage the capabilities — and that is the basic downfall.  When I sign up for something like this, I want it to go POOF and magically integrate with my current Outlook software and basically just lay itself at my feet and say “Use me.”  Nope. First, there are instructions for the “administrator.”  The email tutorial includes comforting words like, “don’t worry about set-up, your administrator will take care of that.”

Dude.  I AM the administrator.

There is no POOF.  After several hours of manual setting manipulation and malfunctions, I am still not synched up all the way. I am especially having difficulty with multiple email accounts on Gmail and Yahoo.  Coordinating the Google Apps seems much simpler.  I’m wondering if MS rushed this to market to be cloud-worthy?  Online support is nearly non-existent.

I’m hanging in there because long-term I know this is the way to go — and the cost/benefit is tremendous – but it has been frustrating for a small business owner to spend so much time on set-up.

Kyoo Channels

I first saw this technology in action at Social Slam. It was an eye-popping interface that organized the social media wall of noise in a very compelling way. This channels development is something new and just launched last week.

This is something to use when you want to find and follow all the online buzz about a particular topic.  Let’s use Google as an example.

People are talking about Google, especially with the recent launch of Google+. And while many of us are using networks like Twitter and Facebook, in addition to blog posts and news articles to follow what people are saying about it, it’s historically been hard to follow the buzz around a topic across a variety of social platforms and news sources without having to visit each website individually. Kyoo Channels is hoping to change that.

Channels enables users to easily follow and interact with the online buzz surrounding popular trends and hot topics in real-time. Kyoo.com is a constantly updated content aggregation website that dynamically displays social content, images and videos surrounding a variety of topics, each on its own visual dashboard.

Each “Kyoo” displays the online buzz surrounding a specific topic – from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, social bookmarking websites, major news sources and blogs.

Current “Kyoos” span a variety of topics – from news and political topics such as the Casey Anthony trial and Barack Obama, to celebrities like Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber, to viral sensations such as “People of Walmart” and Pottermore, to lifestyle trends like extreme couponing and home brewing, and everything in between.

Give it a spin and let me know what you think.

Triberr

Triberr seems to be one of the most controversial developments in blog land.  Simply put it allows you to join a group that automatically tweets all of your new blog posts.

I was an early adopter because my friend Dino Dogan is a founder and asked me to try it out.  I ran into problems early on when the tribe added members who created posts that were inconsistent with what I would normally tweet.  I had to leave the group and start my own hand-picked tribe.

There are a few bloggers who are consistently so excellent I always tweet their posts. People like Stanford Smith, Jeff Bullas, Neicole Crepeau, and Jon Buscall. So we have our own little group going now.

There is a distinct ickiness factor to Triberr because it flies in the face of Twitter authenticity — tweeting a post before reading it.  But from a practical standpoint, it saves me a lot of time. I literally tweet every post from these guys any way so this allows me to offer quality content without digging through my blog reader every single day.

Triberr has added new features constantly, the most important being an option to operate in “manual mode.” This way, you can review queued posts and approve them before you tweet. Without this feature, I never would have bought into Triberr.

The problem is, many people probably won’t go to manual.  So there is a distinct danger of these tribes becoming unwieldy and clogging our streams.  It all gets down to people and their motives and we’ll probably see all flavors of strategies emerge.

In recent days, Triberr has received a lot of coverage, both pro and con but the posts I’ve seen miss an essential point.  Why would people resort to auto-tweeting in the first place? Why don’t they just concentrate on providing insanely good content that people will WANT to tweet?

The simple answer is that the path to breaking into the ranks of elite bloggers is stacked against good content.

With the way blogs are rated, either by Alexa, Post Rank or Ad Age, there is a cumulative effect of backlinks. For example, there was one blog in the Ad Age Top 50 that had not been updated since 2009.  Likewise, a long-time blogger like Chris Brogan may never fall out of the Top 50, even if he never blogs again because of the permanence of the links to his blog.

I also think that in many cases SEO trumps content.  Over the past six months a bevy of SEO blogs have been inexorably marching up the AdAge Power 150 list. I’m not saying they don’t have good content, but I guarantee you they have good SEO.  As an independent, solo blogger, I can’t bring that kind of fire power to my blog. And neither can you. That’s a big reason people are turning to a shortcut like Triberr.   It’s a sprint to get a lot of attention because it’s increasingly unlikely that a marathon of great content will work. My hunch is that if there were 50 SEO-focused blogs all aimed at getting onto the AdAge list, eventually all 50 would get there.

In other words, if you are a new or emerging blogger, it is going to be extremely difficult to get ahead on content alone. I find this a disturbingly sad fact but the reality of the situation. No matter how hard we work, we can’t overcome this legacy of backlinks, if these ratings are important to you.

The current grading systems could drive a focus on SEO gamesmanship over quality content.  We need a better accounting of blog efforts to give everybody a fair perspective of who is delivering great work. For example, a better system would feature a rolling 12 month average of content, comments, tweets, backlinks etc. You would have to “earn” your place every month, not just sit on history. This would at least give people a chance to be the best “now” rather than have to fight against this impenetrable legacy with systems like Triberr.

As for me, I intend to use Triberr in only a very exclusive and limited way as long as my most trusted blogging buddies continue to deliver the goods!

Have you tried any of these tools yet?  What are your thoughts?

I met a young blogger the other day who reported to me that one of his posts (attributed) had been used in the promotional client newsletter of one of the A-List bloggers, in fact probably the most famous blogger around. He was thrilled and hopeful that this fella’s vast audience might find their way to his own blog.

“Did he ask you if he could use your content?” I asked.

“No,” the young man replied.

“So a fellow blogger — and technically your direct competitor — stole your original content to use in marketing materials aimed at promoting his company and increasing his own sales?”

“Yes, I guess so,” he said with decidely less enthusiasm.

“Has he had any contact with you at all?”

“No.”

“Do you think he even knows who you are?”

“I don’t think so.”

This really happened and I see these scenarios played out almost daily.

I have been in the corporate world a long time and I have to tell you, in any business other than blogging, what happened in this situation would probably result in a court case. I didn’t name names because the practice illustrated here is commonplace among social media bloggers.

Now I know there are certain potential benefits of exposure through the article link that can help this young blogger. But the senior blogger in question should know better and be more professional than simply using another writer’s original work without even the courtesy of asking for permission to re-print.

What is it about the social web that makes people think they have the right to use the work of others without even a common “please” or “thank you?” — let alone (gasp) COMPENSATING us for our work? This is simply arrogance and greed that is out of control.  They are giving their fellow professionals less credit than they would give to a $2 stock photo.

The sad part is, I think the entire social web is becoming numb to the fact that this whole system is corrupt.

It reminds me of the time I visited a developing country … a nation run by thugs.  The citizens had been immersed in corruption for so long, they had forgotten what free enterprise was supposed to be like.  The children looked up to and emulated the crooks because they didn’t know any other way.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the broken economics of blogging.  Business “professionals” stealing content for their personal gain is another symptom of a lack of leadership in this space. It’s like some of these bloggers are school yard bullies picking though everybody’s lunch instead of acting like leaders who should be inspiring, mentoring and creating an inclusive business model.

I don’t have any problem with a news feed aggregating content and I’ve never refused somebody’s request to use my content for their own private newsletter.  But it seems like reasonable business professionals would have the courtesy and good sense to at least ASK to use a writer’s work before publishing it as valued-added content for their customers. The social web has been overrun with an entitlement mentality that views any copywritten, original content as something that can be freely re-purposed for private commercial gain.

What’s your take on this? Aren’t you getting fed up with these bullying business practices … or are you comfortably numb?

• Quora is primed to be gamed into oblivion by flacks and SEO gamesters
• Meaningful contributions are edited or “collapsed” by the Quora gestapo
• The platform floods participants with annoying notices and requests.
• The long-format is far too time-consuming for most people.

I knew this blog post was swimming against an ocean of popular sentiment, but here’s what amazed me — almost unanimously, the {grow} community agreed with my perspective!

Now, this is definitely NOT a forum of sycophants. You keep me honest and frequently disagree in a meaningful way so I was really shocked by this … if Quora was such a hit, why did so many people hate it?  I began to think — maybe all of the folks on the comment section were right, and the blogging elite like Chris Brogan and Robert Scoble were wrong.

Turns out the {grow} community was definitely a harbinger of a growing Quora backlash.  In a period of just two weeks, the buzz on Quora is collapsing, precisely for the reasons the community explored and debated.

TechCrunch reported on Quora bitchmemes that were flooding the social web over the past two weeks.  Dozens of anti-Quora posts have popped up and of course there was a huge thread on Quora about it.

Yesterday, influential New York Times tech blogger David Pogue trashed Quora as a confusing, annoying, unusable mess.

But over the weekend, the ultimate backflip occurred.  Robert Scoble, the original catalyst for the mighty Quora buzz wrote a post entitled, Why I was wrong about Quora as a blogging service …

He essentially apologizes for his mis-calculation and over-statement of the benefits of the platform, as it crumbles under a host of problems.

Since I wrote the post, Quora’s challenges have become even worse. The service is filled with set-up questions where companies answer their own submissions, like “why is ABC the leading company for email marketing management?” In turn, the editing by Quora has become more severe and the annoying notifications have multiplied like social media self-help gurus.

I wanted to post this follow-up to say, Hey guys — GOOD JOB!  I think the discussion on {grow} proved to be a leading edge of popular sentiment on this topic.  Really proud of the guts, vision and intellect of this community.

Can Quora recover?  Can they hire enough people to sort through the spam, especially when they are burning through start-up cash?  It’s going to take some immediate and radical surgery. Perhaps a system of qualified or “authorized users” who get kicked out if they spam? No easy answers.

What do you think?  Can anything save Quora or is it going to collapse into a niche?

I was in my favorite used book store this week and saw “The Joy of Sex.” You know, I’ve always been too embarrassed to even pick that thing up in public but I did start thinking about this element of “joy.”  That’s a word that has been a big part of my life but it hasn’t always been that way.  With the fresh start of a new year upon us, I thought this story might give you some energy and inspiration …

About 14 years ago, I was fortunate to attend a masters degree program for applied behavioral sciences led by a wonderful man named Robert Crosby. He is the closest thing to a human Yoda I have known.

Although I loved the program, it was just one more thing piled onto an overwhelming schedule.  I was raising two active kids, surviving an intense career overseeing global brand initiatives, and was being consumed by a charity project that had under-delivered on the resources I had been promised.  Now I had to deal with classwork and a thesis too. The stress and anxiety were taking a toll mentally and physically. Even getting away didn’t seem to help. It would take me at least two days to start to wind down.

Somehow this situation came up in a lunch conversation with Bob.  He just shook his head and looked disappointed in me. I felt a little defensive. “Well,” I said,, “Isn’t being stressed part of life these days? If you aren’t feeling anxiety all of the time, then what DO you feel?”  He looked at me with his wise blue eyes and without hesitation replied, “joy.”

This really knocked me off center.  I didn’t know how to respond because I had never even considered this as a possibility before. What would it be like to live a life where your predominant feeling is joy? From that moment on, I wanted to find out.

This one conversation inspired me to re-evaluate what I was doing — and why I was doing it — on a daily basis. To live in joy.  Isn’t that a wonderful possibility?

As I approached new decisions in my life, I would filter options based on whether they would create more joy or less joy.  I discovered that many of my decisions had been toxic. Something had to change.

The biggest challenge was learning how to say “no,” even if it hurt my career or was politically unpopular. You can probably relate! How much stress in your life is caused by getting into responsibilities you really don’t have the time or passion to achieve?

I reflected that my life was dominated by sucking up to unethical people I didn’t respect, spending time in endless meetings, and squeezing into the middle seat of one more delayed cross-country flight.  I had a hard time approaching these activities with a joyful attitude. I wanted to have more balance with activities that brought real meaning — not just status — to my life.

So I made some changes. By trying to live in a way that enables joy, over time I have created a much simpler, centered, and probably healthier lifestyle. I’m a work in progress and still have my irritable days like everyone else (even Bob!) but at least I’m self-aware and mindfully self-correcting.

Here is something that creates an incredible amount of joy: blogging.  If you have been a regular reader here you probably already sense that.

Sometimes I KNOW something I write is going to make you think and delight you. I can’t wait to publish, can’t wait to see what you have to say about it. Writing for you, tending your comments and really getting to know you is the best job I have ever had. Even when you disagree — maybe even take me on – I just smile and think, “Yeah, you tell ‘em. Way to be strong.”

We’re all in this together. Yes, we want to {grow} but maybe we can also do it in a way that leans toward joy. Thank you for being a very, very big part of the joy in my life!

Now … maybe I should go back and buy that book when nobody’s looking : )

Tell me now … how are focusing on joy in your life?

“How do I create the perfect blog post?”

That question by a young student stopped me in my tracks. After all, is there such a thing?  I had to dig deep on this question and turned to the qualities of my favorite bloggers to find some common themes.  They seem to fit for me — leave a comment and let me know how they land on you!

1. Hoist a hearty headline. Your title is the first thing people see in their blog readers and it may very well determine whether somebody reads your post or not. Headlines can be painful to write — it’s like ad copy. It has to be short and impactful. Try to use an action word that grabs attention. Jay Baer is a master of this on his Convince and Convert Blog. His headlines grab you, shake you, and demand your attention.  I can almost visualize Jay thinking up an active verb to draw you in!

2. Offer an original (personal) view. There is really only one way to differentiate yourself as a blogger.  Challenge yourself to write a post that ONLY you could write. Don’t pontificate about what’s “out there.” How does the subject relate to YOU, your observations, your experiences, your life, your stories? This isn’t narcissism — it’s the soul of originality.  I love the way Danny Brown accomplishes this. He writes about how his life is going in the social media context. He finds a way to connect with us every week because he shares what is unique to him — a discovery, a victory, a disappointment.  It is uniquely Danny every time.

3. Have the courage to be real. When you are creating a work for the world to see, it is frightening to be imperfect.  And yet, how can you be original WITHOUT being imperfect?  The best bloggers are real. Human. Less cautious than the average author.  A role model for me in this respect is Gini Dietrich, especially when she uses her video blogs to connect with readers in a highly personal way. Gini lets us know when she’s stressed, disappointed, worried, mad — basically what is happening with her in the moment. For heaven’s sake, she even had a video of her Thanksgiving dinner!  I think there is awesome power in that authenticity.

4. Don’t just write, re-write. People will spend more time with you if they enjoy your writing.  And to demonstrate a best practice, I’d like to introduce you to the sweetest writer on the social web: Stanford Smith of the Pushing Social blog. This man is an artist and I can guarantee you that he sweats over every phrase and challenges himself to discover new and exciting ways to tell his story.  A blogger can’t hit it out of the park every time, but when they do, it’s probably because they found a way to make the words sing. A trick — read your post aloud to see if it has a natural, conversational tone.

5. Entertain me. “Entertainment value” is not a phrase commonly used in business classes or journalism schools. And yet with the cacophony of voices vying for your attention, isn’t entertainment paramount today?  Are you more likely to enjoy and remember a post titled “An analysis of SEO implications for blogging” or one titled, “How to be a Google Whore” — which used humor to illustrate a dead-serious issue in our field? Mix it up. Add video, photos, interviews, reviews, humor. Be surprising.  I think Joey Strawn is a great example of an entertaining and slightly off-kilter blogger. He is even drawing cartoons to go along with his blogs.

Now you might find it odd that I haven’t mentioned anything in here about the actual subject you are writing about!  Does it matter?  If you create a post with 1) a captivating headline, 2) a unique personal view 3) a personal risk, 4) an entertaining spin through 5) words that sing, won’t that be a joy to read? Of course it would because you’ve crafted a perfect blog post!

What do you enjoy about your favorite blogs and bloggers?  I would love to hear about what makes a post memorable for you …

In a recent post, Michael Bertoldi laments that his blog reader is becoming a sea of sameness: “ROI, engagement, twitter, ROI, criticism, you’re not doing it right, ROI.”

This struck a chord with me.  First, I’m going to trash that post I’m writing on ROI. : )  Second, I realized I’m really getting bored with my blog reader.  I’m guessing maybe you are too so let’s do something about. 

In America, we have this tradition called a pot-luck dinner.  Friends gather at a home, church or community center and bring their favorite dish to share. That way, you get to sample many different types of delicious foods even though you only brought one dish.

Let’s have a {grow} community pot-luck dinner and bring our favorite blog for everyone to sample. 

In the comment section, simply provide a link to one favorite blog. The only request is that you try to cook up something new. We have all heard of Chris Brogan and Brian Solis! What is your one favorite blog you would like others to discover?

I’ll get the party started. I’ve brought the first course.

My blog for you to discover is Cyberpop by Sidney Eve Matrix at http://cyberpopblog.com/  Sidney Eve is a university professor who writes about social media, trends and research from an exciting cultural perspective. Her posts are also thoroughly documented and rich with interesting links.

Ok, time for you to share a tasty blog with our community. Thanks for coming to the party!