Image by Kristina B via Flickr

Blogging isn’t for everyone but it can be far more useful for businesses, organizations, and individuals than most people think.

Here are the practical reasons why I choose to blog despite all the other things demanding my attention.

Practical Reasons Why I Blog

1. Blogging sharpens my skills at expressing myself in my field of expertise.
2. It forces me to check up on my knowledge and opinions before hitting “publish.”
3. It keeps me alert for and learning about new trends in my field.
4. It’s an easy place to refer people when I want to explain more of my thoughts.
5. It gives me better attention from search engines. Search engines love fresh content and often reward it with higher ranks.
6. It creates opportunities for conversations with people interested in the same topics.
7. It shows I care when I give away free information. (Good marketers give first.)
8. It’s an easy place to store my thoughts and information.
9. It provides an easy format for people to leave comments and interact. (Scroll down to comment on this post.)
10. It provides an easy and common way for people to subscribe to my updates (via RSS or email), so we can stay in touch.
11. It provides regular writing practice. We could all benefit from improved writing skills.
12. It sharpens my web writing skills.
13. It sharpens my visual presentation skills.
14. It’s a sample for prospective clients of my knowledge and approach.
15. It’s a writing sample for people seeking help with blogging or writing for the web.
16. It sharpens my knowledge of blogging which better prepares me to help clients with blogging.

And that’s just the practical reasons! I also blog because it’s fun!

In fact, blogging is more effective if you can have fun with it. Oh man, I just turned having fun into a practical thing. Lest we (I) forget, fun is a good thing by itself! Enjoy!

You search, you interview, they start…they stop showing up, or you don’t know what to give them… and you stop trying.

Yet, some people manage to make it work! People are using interns for help with social media marketing, technical jobs, video storytelling, and more. I’ve been collecting their secrets for you.

First, Choose the Right Things to Delegate

It’s not easy to turn over your projects to someone else, much less someone who you’re not sure is that invested or experienced. The  trick is to delegate the right things.

I think you’ll find yourself relaxing your shoulders when you see this list of specific and helpful ideas for what to delegate to interns when it comes to social media marketing projects:

10 Social Media Tasks for Interns (by Aaron Uhrmacher, social media consultant)

In a nutshell…

Don’t let an intern be the one to develop your social media strategy, be your primary voice in social media, or make decisions about how to measure success.

Do let them do important jobs like research, giving you feedback on your campaigns, creating video interviews, and much more.

Read the article for some great specifics on how to make it work. Then start writing that intern job description.

Second, Choose the Right Intern

Never underestimate the interview and selection process.

It’s hard to know what to ask someone who has minimal job experience, so here’s a great cheat sheet for you. These questions will elicit what you need to know:

Interviewing Interns (by Jim Taft, Executive Coach)

It’s Time To Go Searching

Once you’ve got your job description and your interview questions ready, it’s time to post your job and find those interns.

If you need someone soon, try listing on:

• craigslist
• InternJobs

If you can wait about six months for them to start, contact your local colleges for intern options. This is the ideal way to get someone with relevant interests, and with an added level of commitment if they’re getting credit.

Feedback?

What has worked for you? Please leave your comment below. It only takes a minute and you’ll get a link back to your website.

In the previous post about social media, I explained how the playing field has changed for everything, as fueled by the rising access to social media.

When it comes to promoting something on the web, you are not in charge of your own messaging anymore. Everyone is in charge.

What?

Hold on, this could be good news for you.

Potentially, people will spread your message for you, wider than you could ever imagine, if you’re doing it right.

This is called viral marketing, which refers to a message spreading like a virus, that is to say, exponentially and easily from person to person. Sounds bad but look at how successful viruses are. A more positive-sounding description might be “word-of-mouse.”

Viral Marketing or Word-of-Mouse Samples

The Iranian protests and Obama’s election victory are prominent examples of the success of viral marketing.

Momsrising.org’s Mother’s Day video is another hugely successful viral marketing sample. (Watch the video and you’ll get why people spread it to millions of viewers.)

Next Step

To understand how the rules have changed and how to keep up, read The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations. Seriously, order it from the library now. You’ll be on the right page for the 21st century. As a bonus, it’s a pleasure to read.

Protest in Iran 6/17/09 as distributed via Twitter (click for more images)

If you had any doubt left about the potential for using social media (like Twitter) for social change, I hope all doubts are gone this week.

There is a revolution going on all around us — in business, politics, everything! The streets of Iran this week are the perfect reflection of it.

Social media is playing a central role in it all.

Obama’s victory was already proof that social media can be harnessed for change. Most marketing pros would agree with this expert’s synopsis:

Obama won because he created a worldwide rave using the best web marketing methods.

—David Meerman Scott, author The New Rules of Marketing and PR

You don’t need a massive budget like Obama’s to get big attention if you know how to harness social media. The protests in Iran are proof that if people want something enough, and they have Internet access, they are unstoppable.

The Key Role of Social Media in the Iranian Protests

The Iranian protesters are able to organize and be heard globally because of social media — despite repression of communication channels.

Something is going on in the Middle East today that is very new.

—Thomas Friedman, “Winds of Change?” 6/14/09, New York Times

Social media is powerful even when the government tries to block the media and access to Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Twitter is easily accessed via third party applications, so they just can’t stop it.

Media blackouts don’t work anymore. Nothing can be hidden.

Twitter practically ideal for a mass protest movement, both very easy for the average citizen to use and very hard for any central authority to control.

—Lev Grossman, Iran Protests…, 6/17/09, TIME

This Shift in Power Changes Everything!

Not just in Iran.

Next post: What this shift means for YOU

Related from the Blogosphere

A Lesson from Iran for Social Entrepreneurs (Change.org)

Understanding these terms can help you understand more about how web marketing is evolving.

Web 1.0

Web 1.0 is a description of the web being like a library or shopping mall where you can look up information, but contributing to the content isn’t easy. It’s one-way communication.

Web 2.0

In this scenario of the web, you can still find information on the web, but users now have the reins — they can customize views, add to the content (e.g., post YouTube videos, leave product reviews), share their own news (e.g., write a blog), and interact (e.g., socialize on Facebook or Twitter).

There have been interactive qualities of the Internet since the beginning, including email lists and forums. Those were so useful and popular that everyone is getting on board especially as new technology makes it easier and more affordable to build these kinds of web applications.

Interestingly, the founder of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, said this user-driven reality was the whole point of the web to begin with, so he discounts the term Web 2.0, even though I suspect he’s glad we’re finally taking the original concept more seriously. (See “2.0” post for more details.)

Web 3.0

What will Web 3.0 include? This is still in a murky phase; some of the technology and concepts are still under development. But some pieces of the puzzle are emerging already.

Web 3.0 promises to make research on the web faster and easier. You’ll be able to find more comprehensive and meaningful information without having to visit so many websites. Web programming is evolving to handle all this collaboration (“mashup”) of information. (Whoa, major ramifications for web marketing and web development.)

The “semantic web” (which is still in the works) is an essential component of Web 3.0. Mind-blowing stuff when you dig a little deeper. And plenty of privacy and ownership fears to work out.

I think this up-and-coming search engine (or rather “computational knowledge engine”) is a taste of Web 3.0. Try it out:
WolframAlpha

For more about Web 3.0, see:

• How Web 3.0 Will Work (How Stuff Works)
• The Semantic Web: A Treasure Trove for Marketers (ReadWriteEnterprise)

Past, Present, Future, or Overlapping?

We tend to think of Web 1.0 as the past, Web 2.0 as the present, and Web 3.0 as the future. But there is a lot of overlap in time so those are somewhat false distinctions. Some sites on the web are still “Web 1.0.” And some old sites have been incorporating 2.0 methods since the “olden days” of the 1990s.

The terms are more accurately referring to trends, and maybe each style has its place in multiple decades. Similarly, you’ll still see bell bottom jeans worn even if we’re no longer in the 1970s.