StrAIT Blogging on Blogging
Well I’m back on a social media post. I know, I know, I promised the last post on social media was my last post on social media. So shoot me (just kidding). I just attended a webinar put on by HubSpot and the American Marketing Association. It reminded me of one of my blogging hot buttons. One of the recommended best practices in blogging is to specify keywords in the metadata, i.e., data describing the post but not visible in the post that you can see. Then the author uses them as much as possible in the body of the post. This is supposedly a good thing for search engines to see in the post. I suppose that it tells them that the author is talking about what he claims he’s going to talk about. When I do that, my wording sounds forced and artificial. Some people can write that way and it sounds natural. I suppose that when I’m writing that way I feel artificial, so that’s the way it comes out. Excessive wordsmithing can be a bad thing.
Raisin Bran
The presentation also included some interesting ways to categorize blog posts. I have included some of the slides from the presentation. The first category is Rasin Bran. This metaphor speaks to the most basic form of blog post. The presenter told us that they are typically small but useful posts, typically providing “how to” type information. While I don’t write as many of these as the presenter recommends, I do try to make mine useful. The slide tells us to be able to “whip these out”. To be honest, it’s unlikely that I pop out posts as quickly as this slide would imply. I have to catagorize my posts as more of a cup of rasin bran than a bowl.
Spinach
This category of posts are intended to be more thoughtful and be intended to establish a reputation as a thought leader for the author. I confess that is one of my goals. My goal is not so much to be an academic wizard on the technology but to be a practical voice for the use of technology to derive real business benefits. I do spend quite a bit of time thinking about a subject, mapping the major points back to my own experience and applying some common sense in my recommendations. The slide tells me to not do too many of them. Well, this category has been my bread and butter (no pun intended) since I started my blog. I guess that gives me a dinner plate full of spinach or a smaller plate if it’s steamed.
Roasts
This category implies a post that is more like a whitepaper or some other more serious academic work. While I don’t think this is my style, some of my posts have drifted in this direction. Typically, if I feel strongly about a topic and feel that my experience is particularly valuable, I may generate more words than normal. This is fairly rare but they are definitely here. It is impractical to make this the norm because they are more work, especially if I have to create diagrams or illustrations. These topics tend to focus on managing people, organizational communications and aligning technology to the needs of its customers. These are core issues in the successful alignment of technology to business process and aligning those business processes to a clients business goals (“alignment” is one of my keywords but maybe I’ll get credit for “aligning” as well).
Tobasco and Chocolate Cake
I’ve grouped these las
t two together since I don’t intentionally do many of either of these. The Tobasco category implies making inflamitory statements that promote a lot of comments. I suppose I should do more of these type of posts but I’ve never been one to say inflamitory things just to get a rise out of people. That’s never seemed like a useful thing to do. I seem to be able to be mildly inflamitory without even trying and the purpose of this blog is to be a useful reference for my viewers.
I think that this post is probably as close to Chocolate Cake as any post I’ve written. It has nothing to do with any type of alignment (there’s that keyword again) and probably isn’t that useful in running an organization. The Chocolate Cake slide recommends using video and images. Well these slides are images and videos of raw food doesn’t sound like the thing to do. However, I must admit that I am having fun writing this and I’m not being all that serious. I guess that means this post is mostly Chocolate Cake with a side of Spinach. If you like thise slides here is a link to more HubSpot presentations.
The presentation also said that a good post should be between 500 and 800 words. This one is slightly over 800 words, so it’s tim
e to shut it down before the blog police come for me. I hope this post was a good mix of Chocolate Cake and Spinach for you. See you next time…
