Amanda Kendle

Let’s blug: Putting the “u” in blogging at Media140′s DigitalMe conference

The Media140 DigitalMe day took place last Friday and I spoke in the afternoon – and I have to admit that before I showed up I was a little nervous about speaking at the Northbridge Piazza. I don’t know why it felt any different from a lecture theatre or conference hall but being outdoors with a giant screen above my head seemed to change things! Of course, once I arrived and discovered 99% of the audience were sitting on beanbags, I relaxed. The only bad thing was that as a presenter, I had to stand on stage rather than sit in a beanbag. They should look at that for next time round ;-)

Anyway, I wanted to reiterate some of the main points I made in the presentation – all about putting voice into your blog. The title, to be accurate, was “Let’s blug: Putting the “u” into blogging”; I wanted to talk about how it’s not just enough to have a cool design and post regularly, but that also the way you write is still a really vital part of blogging. I’m a “words girl” at heart, and the words of a blog are important to me, and I want them to be important to other bloggers, too.

My minimalist slides below will give you an overview of what I spoke about … more details underneath.

Amanda kendle digital_me_lets_blug (1)
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Basically, the most important point that I hoped people would take away from seeing the examples I gave was that bloggers who people really take notice of and keep going back to are the ones that have figured out their blog’s voice – they’ve managed to inject their personality into their blog in such a way that readers feel they have a trusted relationship with the blogger, they want to keep reading them and they want to tell their friends about them. When I explain it as putting “you” into your blog, I certainly don’t mean that you need to divulge personal or private details, but that you need to write in such a way that readers feel they know you, and they can recognise your writing style, too.

The examples I gave came from varied niches, and I also mentioned during the talk that the public-outdoor-venue G-rated nature of the conference meant I’d had to exclude a number of my favourite blogs! This is not to say that I’m usually a reader of Adult-Only blogs, but G-rating is a pretty big restriction. Some of the blogs that lay on my cutting room floor because of that are on this list – the first five are the ones I featured in my talk:

  • Edenland – particular Eden’s posts on her World Vision sponsored visit to Niger, Africa – lots of honesty (a good way to have “you” in your blog, but not the only way)
  • Life in a Pink Fibro – from multi-talented freelance writer Allison Tait, and I must admit to calling her the Seinfeld of blogging because some posts are kind of about nothing but I am utterly compelled to read them – that’s voice!
  • Why Evolution is True – recommended by a male friend when I realised the target demographic of all the blogs I’d chosen was women – but I agree thoroughly with his recommendation.
  • Aussie on the Road – one of many travel blogs that sound like someone’s just having a chat with you – a good way to develop a voice.
  • Styling You an award-winning blog in Australia and actually makes me want to read about fashion despite having no interest in the topic – that’s voice, too!
  • Parenting, with Crappy Pictures (I wonder if Amber realised that using “crappy” would mean people would have to exclude her from G-rated days?) – one of the “voiciest” blogs I know!
  • Jeff Goins, Writer – Jeff writes a lot about blogging and even includes some great posts on voice now and again.
  • Free-Range Kids – I’ve seen a few videos of Lenore speaking and she writes exactly like she talks – and gets her (important) point across.

      • Hmm. I’m sure there are a stack more great blogs that I eliminated from my presentation for various reasons, but they fail to emerge for me right now, so I’ll come back and add to this list later. In the meantime, I summed up the day with a list of “secret rules” to get some voice into your blog, and I think they’re worth repeating:

      • Blog for yourself – not trying to impress, and don’t expect everybody to like you – thinking it’s a popularity contest will severely limit your ability to have a natural voice
      • Write what you’d like to read – if I read over my post the next day and actually enjoy it and want to keep reading, I figure I’m doing OK
      • Blog like you talk – without the ums and aahs – but if you are stuck writing too formally then try to imagine you are just on the phone telling a friend all about the topic, then write it down like that
      • Break grammar rules (but know them first) – a good rule of thumb for many kinds of writing but works especially well for blogs
      • Read your posts out loud – this will help you catch posts that sound too stilted or formal
      • Don’t be too slang, and don’t be too formal – don’t write like it’s a text message, but it’s not a business report either
      • Be honest, be daring, be a little afraid – if you’re anxious when you hit publish you’re probably on a winner
      • Have your own style (format, word choice) – make an effort to be consistent with how you write so that it sounds like “you”
      • Write from the heart, no matter what topic – you can be passionate about dishwashers if you want to be!

      Anyway, the presentation went well and generated a bit of talk on Twitter, and some of that’s below:

      If you’ve got any examples of your own of blogs with great voice then I’d love to hear about them, so please leave the URLs in the comments below.

      How can I unfriend my Facebook friend?
      Yes, people always ask!

      “How can I unfriend my Facebook friend?”

      If I had a dollar for every time somebody asked this question at one of my social media talks or course, I would be quite a lot richer. I must say, it makes me giggle that people who are just learning how to use Facebook are already so keen to know how they can “unfriend” someone they allowed to be friends with them in the first place – but I know that in the flurry of seeing familiar old faces it’s easy to “friend” people who you later don’t really want to have so much contact with.

      So, the simple answer is: go to your friend’s profile page by clicking on their name or searching for them. Under their cover photo, on the right, next to “Message”, you’ll see a drop-down arrow – click on it and you’ll get this box:

      And then just click on “Unfriend”, and they’re gone!

      “Will this person know that I have unfriended them?”

      This is the second most popular question at my courses, always following close on the heels of the first. See, we’re all still wanting to be polite about this, and that’s fair enough!

      Fortunately, the answer is – probably not. They don’t receive any notification that you have unfriended them. However, if they think of you (perhaps when they think they haven’t seen your updates for a while) they can go to your profile page, and they will then see that you’re not friends. That means if you’re considering “unfriending” someone who you know well or who has only a handful of friends so a missing one will be quite obvious, then you might need to reconsider. I save “unfriending” for people I don’t know, or who I’ve forgotten! – for example, former ESL students who I don’t have any contact with anymore (and they’ve probably forgotten me too), or primary school friends who I haven’t seen in twenty or (gulp) thirty years!

      There is another solution.

      “Can I reduce what I see from certain friends?”
      And finally, a lovely gentleman who came to one of my library talks on social media, Ron, emailed me recently to ask how he could “tone down” the amount of updates he sees from a friend who was flooding his news feed. You know those friends – either they update sixteen times a day, or they post every internet link they’ve visited, or worst of all, they’re playing some of those annoying Facebook games and have their every move posted for us to read. It’s an excellent question.

      So, when you are looking at your news feed and you see a post from a friend you’d rather see less from, hover your mouse over the post until you see another drop-down arrow in the top right area of the post (you can see it below – it doesn’t appear until you hover over the post). Click on it, and you get the following options.

      Choose from “All updates”, “Most updates” or “Only important updates” and you should see either more or less updates from that particular person. Similarly, if you don’t want to see updates from Facebook games, hover over an update in your news feed, click the drop-down arrow and you’ll have options for not seeing posts from various games.

      The best part about this solution is your friends have absolutely no way of knowing that they’ve been “toned down”, unless they steal your password and log in as you!

      PS, to my friend Anita, shown in the example above: no way am I unsubscribing from you! You’re just the example that popped up in my news feed ;-) We are definitely “All updates” kind of friends!

      Looking better online:
      Optimising your online presence course

      My “Optimising Your Online Presence” workshop was inspired by an unfortunate googling incident – as I described in my post on googling yourself – but the workshop itself turned into a very fortunate incident indeed! It was the coming together of a great variety of professionals in Perth – authors, a language teacher, several artists, small business owners of various sorts and even a cheese maker. I told the group before we started the day that I had at least six thousand things I wanted to tell them, but that I’d tried to keep it down to just the most important one thousand of them – I’m not sure I succeeded, but it was a whole lot of fun trying.

      Before the course, I did some good old “practice what I preach” and googled all the names on my class role. They were all a bit surprised when I told them I’d been checking up on them – but that’s the modern world and I was a bit shocked that nobody had googled me when they enrolled in the course. What if I turned out to be a chocolate-loving, crazy nerd? (Oh, I am. Well, it seems nobody minded too much.)

      Each of the participants was at a different stage of their “online development” – some had well-established websites and Facebook pages while others were just starting out, with some still in the early days of start-up of their business itself (how wise of them to come on this kind of course already, I thought). For those with established sites, I made them sit through a website audit – watching a new user look around their site (they were often surprised to see where people clicked).

      We spent quite a lot of time playing with Facebook, tweaking little bits like what I call the “ugly number” that Facebook pages have in their URL until you are able to replace it with a custom URL, as well as talking big picture stuff like how to create engaging content and get your “likers” involved with your page. I also managed to explain a few of the confusions of Twitter, though it remains to be seen if I converted too many to using it – I adore Twitter, but I think most people need to explore it several times before they see the fun and usefulness of it. We covered lots of other areas too: optimising your website, having a blog, and looking at other social media possibilities like Pinterest, Google+ and LinkedIn.

      Big thanks to all the people who came along – I hope you had as much fun as I did, although if you’re even half as exhausted as I am after our long busy day, I apologise! In the spirit of sharing and caring, here’s a list of some of the participants from today – hop over to their (sometimes new) Facebook pages and tell them I sent you!

      A weekend of bloggers, new and old

      It’s Sunday evening and it’s one of the first moments I’ve had to sit at my computer all weekend, despite the fact that it’s been a very blog-focused couple of days.

      On Saturday I presented my Becoming a Blogger course for UWA Extension again, and spent eight hours helping fifteen locals set up and launch their new blogs – when they’ve got themselves properly up and running in a few weeks I’ll introduce them here. Look out for the one about the lorikeet, I think it’s my favourite!

      And this afternoon I hosted a Nuffnang Blogger Meet-Up, a great chance to catch up with a bunch of bloggers who I’ve met through various means – many through my blogging courses, a couple of old friends who coincidentally became bloggers, others via freelance work and even a couple I’d only “virtually” met online, until today. And here they are!:

      Nuffnang Blogger Meet-Up With Amanda

      The overwhelming sentiment here was that it was fantastic to sit at a table with a group of people who didn’t give you quizzical looks when you talked about your blog. Plenty of interesting tips were shared and yes, we ate, drank and were merry, so plenty of fun was had too.

      In case you’re keen on checking out some blogs from bloggers based in and around Perth, then this list of the bloggers who joined me for our meet-up today makes an excellent start. (It’s in alphabetical order because I didn’t want to look like I was favouring anyone – they’re all fantastic blogs by fantastic people!)

      Thanks to all the lovely bloggers who attended and we will definitely have to do it again soon.

      Amanda Kendle Consulting newsletters are in the world!

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