Have you ever considered the ways a blog can help you get a job?  I meet a lot of young people entering the work force and I always recommend blogging as a way to get ahead … in almost any career. Here’s why:

1) Show what you’re made of.  In any interview, you normally have to try to convince people that you know what you know.  In a blog, you can SHOW them.  Blog about current events in your industry, your view on trends and developments and demonstrate your areas of expertise.

2) Build a professional network.  There are lots of examples where people found jobs through connections in a blog community.  Just last week I helped connect a young woman into the professional marketing scene in Chicago because I was impressed with her blog. Your blog community can certainly become a professional network.

3) Engaging versus advertising.   Let’s face it. No matter how creative you get, a resume is still an advertisement. I struggle reading carefully through a lengthy resume. However, I will read interesting stories on a blog all day long.  Compelling content is a way to engage prospective employers in a way that will hold their attention.

4) Point of differentiation.  In today’s world, blogging may be an expectation of many entry-level jobs. Demonstrating an ability to create content may just be the difference that gets you the job over a non-blogger.

5) Sharpen your professional skills. If you’re going to blog about a subject, you need to know your stuff. Putting out thoughtful content requires that you stay on top of your game, which will certainly be an advantage to you, especially if the job-hunting process is a long one.

6) Expand your reach. Building your personal brand means showing up in all the places a prospective employer might find you. Of course that usually means LinkedIn.  But having a link to a blog on your profile, as well displaying a feed of your recent blog posts, gives a potential employer stalking you on LinkedIn more ways to connect with you and learn about your skills.

7) Extend the interview. Here is the last thing you say to your interviewer: “I’ve enjoyed our time together but there is so much more I could tell you about my abilities. I hope you’ll take a look at my blog (the web address is on my resume) so you can see for yourself the way I think about things.”  And you know what? They’ll do it.  You have just extended your interview by another 15-30 minutes and that may make all the difference!

What do you think?  How has blogging helped you in your professional life?

By Stanford Smith, Contributing {grow} Columnist

I’m worried about the social media movement.

Although in some ways the initial enthusiasm in social was overblown, we were right to place high expectations on the convergence of media, social networking, and collaboraton.

However, as of late, something seems to be missing.

Thoughtful dialogue has turned to petty conversations about rules and technique.

Thought Leadership has morphed into clever personal grandstanding.

When I think I’m going a bit overboard I can’t help but notice some disturbing signs – starting with …

The Selling Out of Social Media

One sign is the gradual co-opting of social media as a broadcast tactic. Marketing professionals increasingly use social networks as a platform for reaching precise demographics. Facebook ads for soccer moms, LinkedIn for HR professionals, Twitter for novel writers, whatever slice you want, a social network has it.

It seems that the social faithful have gone to sleep and allowed the pendulum to swing too far to the media side of “social media” cutting the heart out of the movement.

Unfortunately, this approach guarantees that Social Media will play second fiddle to PPC, email marketing, and even SEO in the market discussion.

This is not where we want to end up.

Perhaps this is inevitable since it seems that we have precious few innovators in the field.

Where Are The Innovators?

It’s been a while since I had a “wow” moment.  It seems that the rule of the day is to “model” (read shamelessly copy) instead of innovating. The evidence surrounds us.

There are numerous Old Spice Q&A spin-offs, CEOs are racing to match Tony Hsieh’s Twitter engagement, every company wants Facebook Fan page razzle-dazzle. However, no one is pushing social engagement into new territory.

To be fair, we are struggling to find where that new territory is but far too many of us are content with being copycats and pundits rather than innovators.

Even though this is troubling, there’s one more sign that threatens to hollow-out the promise of social media …

Conversations or Professional Small Talk?

Do a quick audit of company Facebook pages and Twitter accounts and you’ll see a disturbing trend, I call it the rise of “Professional Small Talk”.

It works like this, instead of having meaningful dialogue, the company loads its tweets and Facebook posts with inane conversation starters. You know what I’m talking about -

• “Do you prefer a hot or “white” Christmas?
• What are you wearing today?
• What is your favorite season?

This small talk is entice a person to comment or share. From there, the so-called engagement is rolled up into fancy metric reports showing hockey-stick engagement growth. Does the audience really feel any closer to the business? Nope. But somebody’s spreadsheet looks a lot better.

While Professional Small Talk looks like engagement, its just panders to small thinking and guts the social movement in the process.

So what’s going on here?

3 Habits That Are Sabotaging The Social Movement

Three bad habits have conspired to rob the social movement of its momentum. I’ll touch on them and we can discuss them at length in the comments. Here we go:

Tool Addiction: Sharper minds among us tried their best to intervene and break us of our tool habit. They were unsuccessful despite their tireless work.  The race to focus on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn techniques dumbed down our thinking and forced us to sit at the kiddie strategy table.

ROI Fixation and Vanity Metrics: Almost from the start, “practitioners of the obvious “started beating the ROI Drum. Before marketing professionals even fully recognized the benefit of social business, the ROI priesthood began challenging social’s efficacy.

Instead of calling for patience, harassed social media managers raced to embrace Klout, Follower vs. Following stats, retweets, Likes and other vanity metrics. While the metrics placated executive teams, it forced us to use an inadequate quantitative narrative to describe a powerful qualitative phenomenon.

The Engagement Rut: On the opposite side of ROI Fixation is The Engagement Rut. This happens when simply commenting or tweeting satisfies social media goals. Companies unwittingly embraced this by creating social teams who just needed to “show up” and tweet from a loose script.

Along the way the social program became unhitched from business goals and strategy. Soon, the social person became the passionate and chatty person at the party who didn’t have the faintest clue why she was invited to the party in the first place.

How to Kickstart The Social Movement

I may be biting off more than I can chew here, after all social business is more than just a 700 word topic. However, I believe there are a few key questions that will refocus our attention on what makes social business special and profoundly important to every aspect of business.

How Can Customers Drive Innovation?
Businesses have to invite customers into the design studio. Sustainable innovation will come from satisfying and anticipating customer needs.

Sure, I know Henry Ford’s (and Steve Jobs’) innovation caveat – “If I asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse and buggy” but we shouldn’t use this to lock customers out of meaningful product development collaboration.

Social provides amazing tools for this collaboration and we should be taking the lead in developing and implementing them. Businesses who use social to view customers as the source as well as the beneficiary of innovation will achieve enduring competitive advantage.

How Do We Restore Real Dialogue?
We urgently need to move away from ‘Professional Small Talk” and start focus on building relationships through meaningful conversation.

Notice that the goal is a relationship not just a mention. Once we get our priorities straight we will be able to align expectations around customer lifetime value, loyalty, and advocacy.

How Is Your Organization (or client) Inspiring Its Customers, Employees and Partners?
Social business draws its power from fantastic products and services. People want to talk about their purchases, social media just gives them an efficient way to do so. However, social tools can’t save uninspired products.

Simply having a Facebook page doesn’t create real excitement around your value proposition. As social strategists we should take the lead on helping businesses infuse their products with the ‘wow’ factor.

Do I believe that the social revolution has stalled?

Yes.

I also believe that we have exactly what we need to get our momentum back.

Am I being too harsh? Has social media lost its relevancy in your organization?

Contributing Columnist 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.

With your kind support, {grow} has become a fairly popular blog. With this distinction, I’m deluged with requests to do sponsored posts (companies offering to pay for their promotional content to show up as a blog post).

The scams seem to be getting more aggressive and extreme and I recently pointed out the example of a guy who flat-out lied to me just to get a back-link on this blog.  It makes me wonder … if there are so many people trying to pay me to turn {grow} into their advertisement, they must be having enough success to make it worth their while, right?

There must be a critical mass of influential bloggers out there accepting money for blog posts, otherwise these people would go away!

What follows is a word-for-word transcript of messages exchanged between myself and an actual company seeking a paid placement on {grow}.  I’ve only changed the real name of the writer and her company because I don’t need to embarass this person …

Hello Mark!

I am interested in content advertising opportunities on your site, Schaefer Marketing Solutions,because of its great pool of write-ups.

By the way, this is Susan Rafstein and I work for Synchristic Hosting.com.

Our company is one of the most reliable guides for webmasters and website development in the market. We offer in-depth reviews of various hosting providers and other web-related tutorials.

Are you interested?

Susan

Susan,

Thanks for connecting with me.

If I am reading your inquiry correctly, you are looking to advertise on my blog. Specifically, what do you have in mind?

Mark

Hi Mark!

You got that right. Actually, I’m looking for a possibility if you can do a review of our company, Synchristic Hosting.com. Tell me how much would it cost us for you to publish the review in the blog area of your website.

Hoping you’ll consider.

Susan

Susan,

Maybe this appears old-fashioned but I think being paid to do a positive review is unethical.

Mark

Mark,

I’m sorry if that didn’t sound right to you Mark. That was just merely a suggestion–didn’t say that the review is gonna lean towards the positive side. But I bet that incase you do you it, we will do good.

Anyway, what about we do a guest post?

Susan

Susan,

In all due respect, you are approaching this “pitch” in a disastrous way.

If I am unwilling to be paid to promote your company through a blog post, why would I do it for free? And how does one “review” a hosting company any way?

I have built my blog and my community on excellent content and I’ve built trust, in part,  by not allowing outside companies to convert these great people into sales leads.

Occasionally I do have guest posts from individuals who are active members in the community. I invite them to do posts because they have great ideas or to help them get some exposure for their own work.

However, I’ve never heard of you or your company before so it’s unlikely that I would unleash you on a community of people who have also become my friends.

I would invite you to read my blog, get to know the folks around here, and show up through comments before asking me to promote your content.

This is probably the same reaction you will receive from other trustworthy bloggers, or at least I hope so!  If you do a search on “how to pitch to bloggers” I think you will get much of the same advice I’m providing here.

Best wishes, Mark

Hi Mark!

Again, my apologies if I’m sounding a bit off in your standards. Thanks for the advice and I will take note of that.

I’ve been doing this for quite some time now and honestly, you’re the only one who had that reaction. But there’s a first time for everything, right?

Anyway, I’m concluding this as a negative response from you. Thanks for your time.

Susan

P.S.: Just in case you change your mind, you can send me an email anytime.

Another variation on paid content is paying for backlinks.  I am routinely being offered $100 per link, even if I sneak them into old blog posts.  And while it’s unlikely that many people would ever know about this, I would know about it and it seems … unethical.  Or is it?  Does anybody out there really care any more or are most bloggers link whores?

I’m also seeing a growing number of bloggers routinely featuring their customer in blog posts. Are they directly or indirectly being paid for these posts and links, or simply being polite? Do blog readers notice this like I do? Do they care? Are we just getting numb to it? Or is it smart business?

When I get inquiries like the one above, I wonder if I am that much out of step with the times compared to other bloggers.  Am I simply idealistic?  Stupid?  Surely I can’t be the only one taking a stand on this kind of graft, right?  What do you think?  Would you take the money?

Why am I waving my fist in the air?  You will just have to click on the video to see!

I’m just not much of a video guy but hey, I’m trying!  Here’s a little story about a wide web of social connections coming together over a period of two years to create extraordinary new economic value for me, a university, a client, and several valued business partners.

Social networking for business — it WORKS!

What is your best social networking story? Would you share an experience in the comment section?

The other day in my Twitter stream @joe_sharkey asked:  ”As a new graduate, how do I stand out in the social media jungle?”

I promised I would write him a blog post in response, so here it is!

I believe today’s most successful social media marketing candidates will have three key qualifications:

1) Demonstrated understanding of marketing fundamentals.

2) An ability to rapidly identify, assess and deploy appropriate new technologies.

3) Possess superb writing and communication skills.

Here are some ideas to help you stand out in those areas, even if you’ve already graduated:

Resist the temptation to be a social media guru. When I graduated from college, I thought I knew it all. Turns out, I didn’t know shit. Then, when I was 30, I thought I knew it all. Turns out, I still didn’t know shit. I know … You’re different. And you probably are. It wouldn’t be all that difficult to be smarter than me. But consider getting some actual marketing and client experience with a company or an agency before hanging out your shingle. Better yet, work at a couple of different places first.

Become a beefy marketer.  An ability to navigate Facebook or YouTube might be enough to get you an entry level job at some places but to really build a career you should become proficient at the fundamentals of marketing.  Star performers will be able to apply their love of the social web to marketing research, consumer behavior, product development, personal selling, and brand-building.   Get a degree if you can. If that’s not possible, join the American Marketing Association and immerse yourself in their journals and webinars. Read all you can, attend free webinars every day of your job search, create an effective RSS feed for yourself.

Don’t goof off.  OK, classes are over and you want to head for the beach or Europe for a few weeks. Whatever you decide to do, don’t be out of touch for a few weeks and then head straight into an interview. You need to stay on top of the latest developments and be able to discuss them intelligently when you get an audience with a prospective employer.

Immerse yourself.  You can’t learn social media marketing in college. In fact, you can’t learn it anywhere. You have to do it. Nobody can help you can find your blogging voice. Nobody can help you sense the rhythm of Twitter. You have to jump in and show people you have the chops.

Get experience, even if you do it for free.  Building on the last point, if you really want to do social media marketing, you better be ready to show some examples of what you can do. In this competitive job market, there are just no excuses not to. Lots of people need help. Charities. Churches.  Schools.  The needs are great and budgets are tight so if you can’t find an internship, go make one.

Build your power base.  If you’re looking for a job, this is a good time to start building some online marketing muscle.  Surround yourself with targeted followers, especially on Twitter and LinkedIn.  Engage with them in a helpful way.  Identify yourself in your bio as a job-seeker.  Identify local business people and marketers you can learn from and try to have lunch or coffee with different people a couple of times each week. Check out how Antonia Harler did this.

Blog strategically.  It makes a lot of sense for new graduates to blog like a house on fire. It’s good skill development, but it will also extend your job interviews.  Here’s what I mean.  You go for an interview. Maybe they give you 45 minutes or an hour. Here’s the last thing you say to them: “You don’t have to take my word that I know how to do this stuff.  Go see for yourself on my blog.”  Which, they will do. You have just extended your job interview by at least another 30 minutes.

Hone your writing skills.  Blogging isn’t enough. You need constant feedback, so connect with bloggers who are great writers and see if you can do some guest posts. Be humble. Ask for ruthless editing.  Repeat.

Emphasize secondary skills … even if it’s just a hobby … to provide an extra bonus to employers. If it’s a tight call between two applicants, you might have an edge if you can offer an employer a “combo deal” based on your passion for photography, editing a newsletter for a charity, doing the books for your spouse’s business. This is especially key if you applying for a job at a start-up where everybody has to wear a lot of hats. Find every possible way to differentiate yourself!

Ask for help. See what happened when you sent a tweet asking for help?  You got a whole new blog post out of it.  In general, people on the social web are really cool. If they’re not, find some new ones.  We rarely say no to somebody who is authentically trying to connect with us.

What are the community’s ideas on this one?  What advice would you give to people trying to stand out and break into a social media marketing position?

My wife and I decided to celebrate for no particular reason at a favorite restaurant. When my wife went to the restroom, I checked-in on Foursquare to pass the time.  When I “checked in” to this location, I was surprised and delighted to see a review from one of my best friends pop up on my screen. What a coincidence.  He had been to the same restaurant within the same week. Here was his review:

“This restaurant has always been a family favorite but the service has really gone downhill. I’m convinced the management and staff don’t even care any more.”

Wow.

My friend is a very kind and patient man, so the service must have been absolutely horrible for him to leave a review like that!

My wife returned to the table and after 10 minutes we still didn’t have anybody take our drink order.  Normally, I would have been engaging in conversation and probably not even notice this delay but now my Spidey Senses seemed to be tingling and tuned to the service level.

It occurred to me that I was now EXPECTING poor service because of my friend’s review.  The review had the potential of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Whether we had a good waiter or not, I was now closely watching for signs of problems.

“Don’t you think the service here is slow tonight?” I asked.  “I would really like to order a beer.”

“Well, maybe,” my wife responded. “But I’ve noticed that the waiter had a lot of tables getting their food at the same time, so I think this is probably normal.”

She had not received the same influential message that I had, and so had a totally different experience with the restaurant. She was looking forward to a nice meal at a bustling restaurant. I was looking forward to slow service.

This is how the power of online customer feedback can work for or against a business at any given moment.  I had not seen my friend or spoken to him about the restaurant. Yet his power of influence was now extending beyond space and time, to me and who knows how many others? This is a new kind of “conversation,” isn’t it?  Asynchronous, permanent, searchable … and powerful!

I think this also speaks to the role of social media as a rapid catalyst for change, service, and continuous improvement.

If the restaurant had been attentive to my friend in the first place, they never would have received that negative review. It’s possible that they don’t even know the review exists. And if they don’t address any core problems they’re experiencing, the reviews will continue to pile up to the point that they won’t know what hit them.

Social media is like a Darwinian catalyst. Businesses better adapt, adopt and become the “fittest” because the societal pressures through self-publishing and reviews like this is unprecedented and unrelenting.

With the emerging ubiquity of smart phones, the Internet surrounds us. If I had seen the review before I entered the restaurant, maybe I would have avoided it altogether.

How are you and your customers handling negative reviews?  How would you correct this situation if you were the restaurant I visited?

Nearly every day I receive some variation of this question – “How do I drive more traffic to my blog?” I would go as far to say that there seems to be an obsession with traffic among bloggers.

In my opinion, this is the wrong question to ask if your goal is to build and sustain a successful personal blog.  In fact, the pursuit of traffic may actually be working against your success.

Picking the right measure for success is vitally important because it should drive all of your blogging efforts.  For the sake of this post I’ll assume most people reading {grow} want to build a blog community that will enhance their personal reputation, business opportunities, and financial gain.

In his remarkable classic (and one of my favorite books) Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t, Jim Collins articulates this better than I ever could. He describes how choosing the right metric is absolutely essential to creating sustainable success in a business. It drives laser-like focus and an activity level driven toward that goal. The same goes for blogging.

The myth of blog traffic

If you really want to build community, is it smart to focus your precious time on driving traffic?  Spend some time with the Google Analytics for your blog.  Click around on the statistics from people who are new visitors — “traffic” that arrived via search. How much time did they spend on your blog?  Probably an average of 0.0 seconds right?  How many page views?  The same. It’s traffic, but it’s empty.

Have you ever had a post go viral — that special day that drives the massive traffic that everybody seems to want?  What were the results? Did you get any new subscribers? A surge in comments?  Probably not.  In fact in my experience, other than a spike in daily “traffic” the result in terms of new readers is zero.  Last summer I had one post average 10 hits a second and a week later my blog subscriptions were LOWER. My point is, a focus on traffic and hoping that a post will catch fire is probably an ineffective way to build blog community in the long-term.

The alternative metric

Now look at the statistics of the people who are return visitors to your blog. These are the people who love you and are engaging with you. You are on your way to creating powerful business relationships with them. They are the good folks who will help you grow organically.

Does it really make sense to place most of your effort into driving a continuous stream of strangers to your blog?  Seeking “traffic” generates tourists to your blog. Focusing on content and your readers generates residents for your blog.

If you’re a “solo blogger” like me — balancing blogging with family and worklife – where you spend your time is a big decision.  If your goal is to drive “massive traffic,” you are probably expending effort on:

• SEO keyword research and tools
• Writing posts that are keyword heavy that are most likely to catch a wave of search visitors. By definition, if you are focused on keywords you are probably writing about the same things as everybody else.
• Promotional efforts focused on the low probability that your post will catch fire

If you concentrate on serving the people who read your blog in a way that will encourage them to come back, you would spend your time on:

• Unique and refreshing content no matter what the popular keywords are.
• High engagement with people who comment on your blog today.
• High connection on a personal level — including email, phone calls, and visits – with individual bloggers and commenters who would likely enjoy your blog and become regular readers.

You can see that there is a dramatic difference in approach. And there will be a dramatic difference in results.

Spending time trolling for readers who might stick around based on a chance meeting with your site is blogging alchemy. The real gold is produced by nurturing relationships with devoted readers who will carry the message of your blog to their friends organically.

Steady gains mean a sustainable community

On a daily basis, I have no idea how much traffic is coming to my blog, but I can always tell you how many return visitors came back that day.  Driving that number up over time is helping me focus on the right value-adding efforts that build a strong community that will be generating valuable business benefits.  And believe me — this is a very sensitive metric. When I write great posts, people come back.   Focusing on this number teaches me how to create a better blog for everybody!

If you adopt this slow and steady approach, at some point, you’ll reach a tipping point where enough people are spreading the word, and their friends are spreading the word, that you begin to see ALL your numbers start to go up.

If you have a corporate blog, I recognize that your goals may be more focused on specific lead generation and maybe SEO does make a lot of sense.  But if you’re like me — trying to build meaningful business relationships — think about taking care of those return blog visitors as your first priority.

Are you serious about building a loyal community?  There are no SEO shortcuts or silver bullets.  You have to build a blog community just like you build your customer base — one person, one connection, one relationship at a time. And that starts with correctly identifying your goals and how you are going to spend your time.

So what are you waiting for?  Let’s get to work!

What’s working for you?  Community? SEO? Or both?

Note: The link to Good to Great is an affiliate link.

By Srinivas Rao, Contributing {grow} Columnist

The headline for this post I think is a very applicable philosophy to approaching the social web.

If you have really immersed yourself in this world you’ve probably experienced what Mark calls this wonderful random synergy of social media by now.  You’re probably forming amazing new relationships, but have you ever wondered how this happens?  What is the process?

Between running a podcast and talking to people on Twitter, I spend an absurd amount of time building relationships with people online. While I wish I could boil it down to an exact science, I can’t. I form great relationships with some people and with others  nothing seems to materialize.  I’ve had guests on my podcast that I seem to get along with and then never talk to me again and don’t even tweet the interview I did with them.  There’s something about building relationships online that you can’t really quantify or distill into a formula. I call it the “click factor.”

There’s really no step by step guide for creating the click factor with people online. Everybody seems to find different things that make them click with each other. For some it’s a common interest while for others it’s a similar sense of humor that ties them together. The hardest thing about understanding the “click” factor is that it really can’t be forced. It’s something that has to occur naturally and if you open yourself up to new people a world beyond your wildest dreams will emerge.

What Makes us “Click” with Each Other?

It’s no secret that if somebody flatters you, you’ll have a tendency to like them. But we have to be careful not to take this too far given that people will see right through your insincerity.  The other thing to note is that your flattery might even be completely ignored. Where we really start to click is when we get beyond flattery and find ourselves in an ongoing conversation that seems to go from hours to days to weeks to months.  Pay close attention to who these people are in your own network because they’re the ones you’ve really clicked with. There’s people that I’ve been talking to on twitter for months on end and probably will for as long as Twitter is around because we simply click.

3 Clicking Case Studies

Bud Hennekes: Bud Hennekes is a young blogger who I interviewed a while back. Truth be told I didn’t really like him that much because he told me about all the things that were wrong with my blog Skool of Life. To his credit he was spot on about all of them and when I made those changes, all of a sudden he was much more interested in what I was up to. Over time Bud has been a big supporter of everything I’ve done and has made predictions about how “massive” BlogcastFM will be. When somebody believes in what you’re doing like that, you can’t help but want to be in their corner. The more you believe in someone else the more they’ll believe in you, especially if you kiss a few digital babies.

Crystal Street: Crystal Street is somebody I consider a great friend online. She does amazing photography work and  I can’t even recall exactly how we connected. But it wasn’t long before I found myself talking to her almost every single day about surfing, photography, travel and everything else. Something about her inspired me and I’m guessing something about me inspired her. As a result we just clicked.  When you manage to inspire each other you almost tend to act as the fuel for each other’s fire. We all need a bit of fuel for our fire. Figure out who yours is.

Jessika Hepburn: Jessika is the owner of OhMyHandmade a very popular site in the handmade community. I’m not really an avid reader of Handmade blogs, but  I’ve connected a few members of the handmade niche because it turns out we have a very strong BlogcastFM listener base there. Jessica was recommended to me as  potential guest by another one of our listeners. Even through our tweets I got a very friendly vibe from Jessika and I could tell I was going to like her. Just remember people can feel everything you say, even if it is digital. After our chat, I sent Jessica copy of my e-book and based on her response it was clear we had really clicked. We had very similar ideas of how relationships are built online.  We don’t have much in common in terms of our blogs, but somehow we still clicked, which is why you should talk to plenty of people outside your niche.

What is the common theme?  There isn’t one!  And yet the Cllck Factor is undeniable.  How is the Click Factor working for you?  Is there any rhyme or reason to your online relationships?

Srinivas Rao is a contributing writer to {grow}. You can read more of his original writing at The Skool of Life blog or listen to his podcast at BlogcastFM. Follow him on Twitter at @skooloflife

I’ve probably read 10,000 blog posts and there is one topic that I rarely see expressed. So today, I’m going for it.

As a blogger, it’s cool to be annoyed, excited, introspective, outraged, depressed, happy, mad, sad, and glad. But it is never, ever cool to be proud.

I think the reason is simple. Social media at its core is narcissistic. Even though the benefit is connecting with other people, you generally write, post, and tweet about what is going on with you.  I mean, it’s the subject you know better than anything, right?

Whether you’re online or offline, it’s generally unacceptable to go around shaking your tail feathers with every accomplishment, but on social media that taboo is amplified because we KNOW it’s narcissistic so we want to show up like we’re as dramatically un-narcissistic as possible.

But as I sit here on a Sunday morning, something very amazing has happened and if I really am honest and write about what’s going on with me at this moment on my social media journey, I can’t avoid using the P-word — Pride.  So let’s plow some new ground  and write a blog post that admits: “I’m allowing myself one moment, one blog post, to be proud of myself.”

The past few years have been a wild ride. It seems like the career momentum is building week by week and sometimes day by day.  The social web enables me to paint on a global palette and I’m enjoying every minute of it.

I’ve had many reasons to feel blessed and grateful to you, my {grow} friends who have been with me every step as my blog creeped into the AdAge Top 50, my book The Tao of Twitter charged into the top 5 communications books on Amazon, and my teaching and consulting activities matured into more interesting and high-profile engagements.

I cannot claim singular responsibility for any of this. There is no such thing as a successful solo artist on the social web. We all conduct our own riotous symphony of friends and followers who help, support and cajole us every day.

Through all this I have done a good job keeping things in perspective and keeping an even keel, but something happened today that eclipses all those professional developments and prompted this expression of pride.  I was quoted in The New York Times.

This made a profound emotional impact on me because the New York Times has been such a special part of my life.  As a journalism student, I studied the New York Times as the pinnacle of my profession. As an adult, luxuriating in the Sunday Times — filled with art, books and travel — is a weekly oasis. And as an intellectually-curious adult I marvel at the depth of reporting, the artistry of the writing and the power of its importance as a journal of record. When they went to a paid subscription model , I swear I was the first one in line with my credit card.

And now here I am.  I’m in there.  For good.  I feel so very humbled, joyful … and proud.

There, I said it.  I’m proud.

By the way, there is an extremely good lesson here about the power of blogging.  The NYT reporter, Stephanie Rosenbloom, didn’t find me through connections or because of my reputation. She found me through a blog post about social influence.  

In my post Ten Reasons to Blog Even if Nobody Reads It, I mention this possibility of vast exposure as a unique aspect of blogs. To have an opportunity for massive reach, you can’t depend on Twitter or Facebook updates — you MUST have a blog. Blogs are important!

Any way, thanks for obliging me a moment of sunshine, rainbows, unicorns, and celebration.  My wife just reminded me to take out the trash so it’s back to the real world. As always, the inexorable tide of daily life has wiped out this moment and it’s back to business.  And that’s a good thing. 

In the comment section, I invite you to break the blogging taboo with me and tell everyone something that happened to you this year that YOU’RE proud of!  It’s an important part of who we are, isn’t it?  Let’s celebrate it!