Categories
blogging

Promoting Personal vs. Professional sites and posts

I'm Blogging This
Image by Michael Heilemann via Flickr

I have a question for those of you who maintain more than one blog, as I do.

As many of you know:

  • I write regularly for Inc.com on the Start-Up Toolkit blog.
  • I have with the Harbrooke Group blog for my business.
  • This blog is for personal observations, and more for friends, though it is open to all.

I was recently talking with a client who also blogs for a major magazine as well as having a blog for her business, and we were exploring the ins and outs of when to link to which blog. We were discussing this issue, and I suggested we put our collective questions out to my audience.

Here are our questions:

  1. If we’re writing about a topic we’ve covered on both our own personal blog and the magazine’s blog, when is it okay to reference one of our personal blogs on our magazine blog? Is that too self-promotional?
  2. If we’re able to cross post items to both our own blog and the magazine at the same time (I’m not – I have to wait, per my contract), do we promote the magazine version or our site’s version on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.? What’s the difference, if you’ve got the exact same content?

The core issue here: as the web changes, do we still need to promote our  ‘home base’  even though people can find us from anywhere (our blog, magazine, Facebook, Linkedin, or wherever)?

Another caveat is that when we interview someone for our magazine blogs, they’re more interested in a link to the magazine’s site because of the visibility. However, the advantages of our own sites are that we can provide more material and different angles than we can fit on our magazine blogs.

There’s the idea of a “platform” here – a place to gather an audience outside of the magazine site – potentially for advertising, potentially for showing an audience to a publisher. (I may yet write a book one day.) Are we losing those opportunities if we point all the traffic to the magazine blog?

I tell my clients – “put stuff out there to be shared – as long as people know it came from you, who cares where they find it?” This is usually in the context of things like YouTube videos or other digital assets. Does the same hold for blogging?  Can we just put our stuff out there knowing people will know who we are in 2010?

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Categories
Random Thoughts

Tasty Toronto

This past Tuesday, I attended a Blogger event for a “Taste of Toronto” put on by Chef Mark Tafoya and Jennifer Iannolo – The folks behind the Culinary Media Network. I arrived and quickly met the folks from Porter Airlines Taste of Toronto Event 5-4-10 who would soon become my benefactors – but more on that later.

I was served some sort of amazing lamb chop that just melted in my mouth. Then I saw chef Mark,who let me know about a Mixology demo about to start.Taste of Toronto Event 5-4-10

Entering the mixology room, I saw Jennifer, and she introduced me to the mixologist Rob Dvorchik from  from AME Restaurant, who whipped up asian-inspired cocktails. I had a sip of the ginger-based gin concoction, really great.
Taste of Toronto Event 5-4-10

Then it was back to the main room, where I spoke with the lovely woman from the Intercontinental Toronto Centre. Seems they’ll be giving loaning guests iPads with which to navigate the Toronto streets and learn about the local sites. This four-star hotel is right in downtown next to the Metro Toronto convention center. I’ve been inside before but never stayed there. That won’t be a problem, though because…

As I quickly chatted with some of the other Toronto attraction folks, the Porter Airlines people told me about a contest they were running. I had to add a photo of myself with their mascot, Mr. Porter, to their Porter Airlines Facebook Fan page.
IMAG0013

I did so, then had my friends “like” the photo on Facebook. The person with the most likes won. And that, my friends, was me.

So, blogger disclosure time, I’ve won a trip to Toronto on Porter Airlines, and I’ll be staying 2 nights at the Intercontinental. I’m quite excited about this, and so is the wife! (Nice mother’s day gift, at the last minute too!)

Congratulations to Mark and Jen for putting on a great event. I enjoyed my taste of Toronto, and I can’t wait to visit the real thing again soon for a full bite of the city!

Taste of Toronto Event 5-4-10

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Categories
facebook geeky

A test of the FB Like System

Testing to see if I can both “like” this post and post comments to Facebook about it.