One thousand posts. No navel gazing.
Feb 12th
This is my 1,000th post on {grow}.
So I wondered … what should I do to commemorate this? Should I give away presents like Oprah? Should I honor my community in some way? Should I just ignore it and carry on?
I asked some of my friends on Facebook and the general consensus was that they wanted me to write a reflective piece on what I have learned, my expectations when I wrote post number one, and the challenges of success.
I started answering these questions a dozen times but it just seemed like a bunch of self-centered navel gazing so I quit. Maybe I’ll get to these subjects another time but I think the focus today needs to be placed on the {grow} community. You see, it takes a lot of work to create that many blog posts, but it would not be successful without you.
In my brief period of {grow} nostalgia (about an hour!), I looked down the list of subscribers and wanted to find the people who have subscribed to my blog for the longest period of time. Who was here first? Who has stuck with me the longest?
This was a revealing exercise and a lesson in building a blog community. The people who were there at the beginning are still there today. In fact. we’re all good friends! We were “baby bloggers” together and went out of our way to support each other when the rest of the world did not seem to be listening.
I thought it would be appropriate to celebrate 1,000 blog posts by honoring the people who encouraged me and supported me from the very beginning. Here are the original 10 {grow} readers, and here are their stories. And at the end … yes … I will give away some prizes : )
John Bottom — John is a director at the Base One Marketing Agency in London. When I was just starting out, he was already a big deal with a huge, lively following and wonderfully insightful blog posts. I clung to John as an example of how I needed to operate on the social web — in a caring, classy, and responsive way. He was the first social media celebrity to begin tweeting my blog posts and I am forever grateful for that. I had the chance to meet John in London in 2012, which was quite a thrill.
Jayme Soulati — Jayme is a PR and communications dynamo from Ohio and one of my first Twitter friends. I will take credit for being the one to beg Jayme to begin her blog and once she started she found her great love. I remember her telling me that blogging was now the favorite part of her job. She stood by me in the early days and I had tears in my eyes when I met her for the first time at Social Slam in 2010. In fact, the day before the event a speaker cancelled and she graciously filled in!
Jenn Whinnem — Jenn is a passionate young woman and her firey posts caught my attention back in 2009. We collaborated on a couple of projects and she taught me a lesson that resulted in one of the the most humbling and emotional blog posts I’ve ever written: “Social Media and the Big Conversation Fail.” She has been a wonderful supporter and has contributed many amazing comments to the community!
Jon Buscall — An intellect with the heart of an artist, Jon and I are social media soul mates. We have similar backgrounds and hold many of the same values when it comes to teaching and working on the web. I think he holds the record for the most guest posts on {grow} (aside from the paid regular bloggers). When I visited Stockholm, I spent a cafe day with Jon. And that, my friends is the best part of social media.
Kristen Daukas – One of the most fun and big-hearted professionals I know. Mom, entrepreneur, ass-kicker. We have collaborated in a number of ways but the most fun was speaking at her awesome Converge South conference in North Carolina. It was one of my very first keynote speeches. If you look really closely, Kristen’s picture is in the Tao of Twitter.
Steve Dodd – Nobody has commented more often that Steve. He has been the rock of this community since day one. I really think he was the first one to see the potential of what was happening on {grow} and I am so indebted to him for his continuous encouragement. He is the only person among “the originals” I have not met, but not for lack of trying!
Amy Howell – When I started exploring Twitter, it was hard to miss Amy since most tweets ended with !!!!!!! This became known as the Exclamy style of tweeting. She has been a tireless and and passionate supporter of the blog … and really everything I do. Amy has been a trusted adviser and friend from the beginning. She is a super-connector who has been featured in two of my books, and introduced me to so many wonderful colleagues like Anne Gallaher, Glen Gilmore, and Kent Huffman. And she is going to be the emcee for Social Slam this year!
Billy Mitchell – A few years ago, Billy had a strange strategy for getting attention. His avatar featured him posing with this huge fish. He kept popping up everywhere and you couldn’t help but notice this guy with the fish. We started connecting over Twitter and the blog and soon became close friends. We have collaborated on many projects and his ability to spin a tale and the fact that he understands my jokes makes him my favorite business partner. His B2B Agency MLT Creative is simply an inspiration.
Kimmo Linkama – How cool is it that, through Twitter, I have a great friend in Estonia? Kimmo Linkama is the first person I ever interviewed on {grow} and the only person I have interviewed twice, primarily because he has a such a musical name. Estonia is an awesome place with a progressive economy and Kimmo is leading the B2B marketing charge in the region. In this photo, I am visiting with Kimmo in Estonia’s capital of Talinn.
Michelle Chmielewski – Of all the people I have met, the story of how I connected with Michelle is probably my favorite, and a highlight of the The Tao of Twitter and many of my classes. I recognized Michelle’s simply brilliant talent when she was a grad student and she has gone on to be a bright star on the European marketing scene. Some of her videos have had more than a million YouTube views. I know talent when I see it! I met Michelle in real life in Paris in 2011 and we continue to support each other whenever we can.
Here’s the lesson threaded through all these little stories. Many beginning bloggers think they will hit it big by getting noticed by an A-Lister. They long for that one tweet of a blog post that will propel them to the big time. It does not work like that, and in fact there are no shortcuts to social media success.
Don’t wait for lightning to strike. Build your own tribe. Find your own little group of people who love you for who you are, support each other, and build from there. It’s hard to say how big my tribe is today but it all started with these 10 people. And no matter what happens to me or the blog, I know those folks — and now dozens of others I have met along the way — will still be my friends. Perhaps this is the year you and I will meet, too!
Thank you, thank you, thank you one and all for reading my blog.
Now, on to the prizes!
I would like to give everyone a chance to celebrate and participate in this 1,000 post milestone, so I’m giving away:
- Five copies of Return On Influence (one copy x five winners)
- Five copies of The Tao of Twitter (one copy x five winners)
- Five copies of Born to Blog (a new book I have not even announced yet!)
- A chance to write your own guest post on {grow}.
- A free one-hour phone consulting session on any marketing topic of your choice (or we can just hang out!)
- Five free subscriptions to my social media tutorial video series “Social Media from Scratch.”
- Five free tickets to Social Slam (America’s finest social media conference April 5 in Knoxville – one ticket x five winners)
Here’s how the drawing works. Send me ONE email at info at businessesGROW.com. Include the ONE prize you want to try to win in the subject line and your physical mailing address in the body of the email. At the end of February, I will have an independent CPA randomly select from the submissions and award the prizes to the winners. There will be a lot of submissions so I can’t let everybody know if you lose, but I will let you know March 01, 2012 if you win.
The train is leaving the station again. Next stop … 2,000 posts!
Our Digital Footprint. When a Friend, and a Network, Dies
May 26th
This poignant post comes from {grow} community member Jenn Whinnem …
Remember Friendster? The social network that predated even MySpace (or am I showing my age?)? At any rate, it shuts down at the end of May, and I’m having a hard time with this.
See, Friendster is my last connection to Curtis, a friend of mine who died nearly eight years ago. That’s why I haven’t been able to bring myself to delete my account, even though Friendster stopped being a truly viable social networking service in 2005 (I think).
I never met Curtis – he was someone I knew through a message board and chat room. This was how I amused myself while I attended a rural college nearly ten years ago. Many of the people I met online became friends in real life.
Curtis was in his early 20s and very, very into music. In fact, he ran the site rantcore.com (no longer available), and it was pretty well known in punk circles back during that different world that was the internet in early 2000′s.
Curtis and I bonded because we were sickies. I have cystic fibrosis and Curtis had something called demyelinating polyneuropathy. This meant his nerve sheaths were destroying themselves, and he was becoming weak enough that he had just started walking with a cane. He was in pain every day.
At one point, he confided in me that he had found a blog (a newish thing, at the time) by a guy with an advanced case of the disease. The post that got to him was the one where the guy purchased a car for the handicapped that would load his wheelchair into the car for him.
When you have a fatal disease, you have these moments where you realize: this is going to happen to me. You feel your mortality. This was one of those moments for Curtis as he realized what his disease was going to do to him. If he did attend one of his beloved punk shows, it would be in a wheelchair. That was, of course, if he could even breathe. Curtis and I talked a long time about what this would mean for him.
And yet, this never happened.
Curtis slipped in the shower and hit his head. He lived alone, so he bled to death. We found out because his girlfriend logged into chat one day to tell us he had died. A friend verified this with the county coroner.
I can’t tell you what this felt like, to grieve for someone I knew but had not met. I talked to Curtis everyday for almost a year. He sent me a .zip file of The Bangs to cheer me up once; I told him stories about my job taking care of the elderly. You can’t tell me that that’s not a friendship.
Curtis died November 25, 2003 – just a few months after Friendster started and we joined. Every year I get a little reminder about his birthday, and I log into Friendster, see his photos, read the funny comments people wrote about him. Friendster shutting down means I lose one more little piece of Curtis.
It’s something that many of us don’t like to think about, but I’m going to ask, because what I learned from Curtis is that it can sneak up on you way before you’re ready for it: what’s your digital legacy? How will we remember you after you die? What do we do when the comments are gone?
Jenn Whinnem is the Communications Officer for the Connecticut Health Foundation (www.cthealth.org). In this role, she is in charge of the web and social media for the foundation. You can find her on Twitter www.twitter.com/jennwhinnem.
Turning an online relationship FAIL into friendship
May 25th
Lori Witzel, a newcomer to our community, asked me a good question the other day. “Did you get any phone calls? You left me hanging!”
You see, she had just read a blog post I wrote last year called “Social Media and the Big Conversation Fail.” The summary of the story is that my entire view of social media relationships had been shaken when I realized somebody I had considered a social media “friend,” Jenn Whinnem, had cystic fibrosis. I felt humiliated that I had not known this collaborator of mine suffered each day. What kind of a friend is that?
So I vowed to do better. In that post I issued a blanket invitation for my blog community to call me. It was a risky move. Many thousands of people read my blog every day! But it was also a necessary move. Is this a community or not?
The answer is, yes, this is an amazing blog community and lots of people called me in a very respectful and manageable way. Generally people DM’d me and we set up a time to talk. I allocated time each week for community chit-chat. I stopped counting, but if I had to guess, I would say that I’ve talked to at least 75 people from {grow} since that post.
This was by far the best thing I have ever done on this blog. You see, lots of people COMMENT on my blog, but few really give me feedback. There’s a big difference. I found the unvarnished conversations with my audience brought me closer to them personally and helped me improve professionally as well.
Here’s an example. One of the most profound conversations was with Caroline Di Diego, an entrepreneur in Singapore. I didn’t know her at all. I had not recalled her ever commenting on my blog, and maybe she tweeted it a few times but other than that she was a blank.
“You asked me to call,” she said. “So I thought I should. Your blog has changed my life.”
And the conversation just got more interesting from there. Sometimes I get a little down when a “smart” post I write bombs and then something silly like “The 20 Craziest Things You Can do on Twitter” goes viral.
But Caroline could recall every “smart” post I had written. And not only could she recall them, she could recount how it made her re-consider how she was conducting her business. “You write a blog that makes me stop what I’m doing and think,” she said.
I’m a lousy golfer. But if I have just that one great shot, it keeps me coming back. Caroline’s phone call was kind of like that.
And of course the first person I called after the post was Jenn. And a few weeks ago, we actually met in person when she flew from Connecticut to Knoxville to attend Social Slam. Oh yeah. She was unemployed at the time she made the reservations. “I want to meet you,” she simply said.
I hosted a little event for the {grow} community and tears filled my eyes when she walked in the room. I was overcome by emotion as I met this person after two years of friendship — now REAL friendship I think — and collaboration.
The whole experience has been inspiring! I encourage you to try it with your own blog community. Don’t be a stranger. Call people up and see what they think! And by the way, when are you and I going to talk?
Welcome to {grow}
You’re in marketing for one reason: Grow.
Grow your company, reputation, customers, impact, profits. Grow yourself. This is a community that will help. It will stretch your mind, connect you to fascinating people, and provide some fun along the way. I am so glad you’re here.
-Mark SchaeferFollow Mark
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