Joe Hackman — Page 30

Why do you blog?

January 19, 2011 by Joe Hackman 97 Comments

Blogger Tag Cloud by Joe Hackman (via Tagxedo) I was reading a comment today from Ileane and she was sharing with me that her daughter got her into blogging. I also learned not too long ago that Gini Dietrich started Spinsucks because she was frustrated by the way that many PR professionals created a very poor impression of the PR industry. This inspired me to write this post, because I suspect the answers to the question “Why do you blog” will be far more interesting than the post itself.

Why do I blog?

I started blogging years ago on my company website in the late 1990’s, I didn’t realize what I was doing would be called blogging one day. I mostly wrote stories to inform my company’s clients about changes occurring in the IT industry that might affect them, and I actually still do that on Facebook and at Managed Solutions. I continued to do that for a number of years and eventually in 2008 I started blogging using wordpress.com on my blog called “Reasonable Ideas”. On that blog I wrote mostly about non-profits and science. This experiment would carry over into my next blog Joegonesocial.com, the blog you are most likely reading this story at. When I decided to embrace social media it was not an easy transition from paranoid IT Security minded guy to the more open and public Internet footprint that comes with being a blogger. In light of that I made the decision to wholly embrace social media and to add it to my “must do’s” in my business. Bottom line, I blog for a lot of reasons but the core (and intentionally vague!) reasons I blog are:

For business reasons.
For personal reasons.

Why do you blog?

I am intentionally not giving a lot of detail about my reasons, I really want this post to be more about you and why you blog. What do you blog about and why? I look forward to hearing about you.

Learn about personal branding from the Brandapalooza panel

January 14, 2011 by Joe Hackman 8 Comments

What is personal branding and why might it be important if not essential to you and your success?

Our panel: Amber Osbourne a.k.a. @missdestructo, Olivier Blanchard a.k.a. @thebrandbuilder and Mitch Neff @mitchneff will be discussing building personal brands in Social Media next Wednesday on my Brandapalooza Blog Talk Radio show. All three of these individuals have built strong online personal brands. The discussion will bring to bear a tremendous amount of knowledge about building your personal brand in Social Media.

Is there anything you’d like me to ask the panel? Leave your questions in the comment section below or via Twitter.

Image: Stefano Principato

Thumbnail tips and tricks for posts with embedded video (Video)

January 12, 2011 by Joe Hackman 21 Comments

I was writing a post about the importance of including images in posts with embedded video’s recently and discovered a great little “hack” to hide said images so that only the thumbnail would show up when shared. This post is the result of that discovery, it solved a long standing issue that I had with video only posts. If you also had come across this issue the video tutorial in particular will be very valuable. There is actually a hidden image immediately after this paragraph, view the page source if you want to see it or watch the video to see how it was done.

The problem with embedded video posts

Posts with only embedded video and no pictures do not display as nicely when shared on Facebook, Linked In and other similar sites. For example, when I share a post without an actual image included, these are my thumbnail choices:

None of these are appropriate in most cases as they do not represent what I am posting about. The thumbnail should represent what the post is about, here is a good example:

In the example above the image represents the 2 Year Anniversary of Waxing Unlyrical (Shonali – that’s 3 days in a row, inside joke sorry readers). With the two candles you really get the gist of what the post is about before reading it, the image ties in perfectly with the title and what the post is about. The example above is clean and professional.

The solution is simple – an appropriate but hidden image, this video will show you how you do it:

Bring more readers to your blog with the LiveFyre comment system

January 11, 2011 by Joe Hackman 72 Comments

In my recent post about tagging people on Facebook there was a robust discussion that occurred that was largely not related to the post but was actually centered around the Livefyre comment system itself. In this video I explain how and why that occurred and how you can use the system to bring more readers to your blog.

What comment system do you prefer and why?

Facebook Tips – Tagging best practices and etiquette (Video)

January 10, 2011 by Joe Hackman 45 Comments

I recorded this video to show people how to use the relatively simple tagging function on Facebook. I also explain more in depth in the video some of the etiquette involved with tagging people and pages. This is a great introduction to the feature if you are unsure how to use it or are looking for a starting point on etiquette.

What would you like to see?

Do you have any Facebook related topics that you’d like to see a video of? Please let me know and I will try to include it in this series.

Mentioned in this video/post @Lifehacker and @Shonali