My friend Steve Farnsworth recently shared a link to some tips from Matt Ceniceros at Applied Materials about how to encourage blog posts from team members who hate blogging.

Something about that concept got me thinking. It wasn’t encouraging team members to blog, as that’s critical for all organizations seeking to embrace the notion that every company is a media company. It was the point about team members who “hate blogging.”

They don’t really hate blogging. They hate their job: and that’s a problem beyond the fact that you can’t get them to blog.

Blogging is value creation

Writing for your company to reach customers, the industry, your coworkers, the media, etc. is value creation for your brand. You are creating value in the form of content, which attracts non-paid traffic, relationships being built by growing your community, trust by sharing thought leadership and attention by creating inbound PR. Savvy and passionate team members understand this. When you find an organization full of A-list employees you’ll find a mutual excitement about the fact that through blogging they are able to maintain a relationship with the world. That should be a joy, not a chore.

Blogging is a metacognitive exercise

Even beyond external benefits, blogging itself is a positive for motivated team members seeking to better themselves. It is a metacognitive exercise that allows the professional crafting it to self-actualize. Or in simpler terms: it’s like going to the gym for your brain. Interested team members not only find the exercise enjoyable, but realize they are lucky enough to be in such a position. They view it as something they get to do vs. something they have to do (even if it is mandated).

When every company is a media company, every team member is a media producer

The leading voices on your team are now one of your most valuable marketing assets. And the sharpest among them are throwing themselves into this role. It is telling that some organizations have team members excited about contributing to their company’s own brand of media, while others have blogs that are gathering dust or full of contrived content.

You can’t force people to write and expect it to resonate

If at any point you’re trying to persuade someone who hates writing to do so it’s going to suffer anyway. Blogging is an act of love and is difficult, if not impossible to fake. You can’t force someone to make art, nor can you force them to blog.

If your team isn’t encouraged and excited by these benefits then you have bigger issues than persuading them to blog. At this point trying to convince unmotivated team members to blog is treating a symptom but not the cause of a larger issue at your organization. And we all know how well treating symptoms but not causes works out.

image credit: Shutterstock

If Your Team Hates Blogging, You Need A New Team is from The Future Buzz, a Blog Covering Digital Marketing

The Future Buzz is now sporting an all-new look. My name is Michael Martin, and I’ve been working with Adam on this for the past few months. I’d love to share some insight into the thoughts behind the redesign, and get your feedback on it all too!

Just to sidestep first and give you a quick overview of who we are; I work in a small web design team called Pro Blog Design. We specialize in all things WordPress and we worked with Adam on his last design too, so it was an honor when he got in touch with us again for version 4!

Moving straight on though…

Why Redesign?

This is a question that all site owners ask themselves every now and again. Why redesign? Building a new design from scratch is a big undertaking, so it’s not a choice that anyone makes lightly.

In Adam’s case, the main reason was to take The Future Buzz to the next level. Until now, The Future Buzz has been very much Adam’s personal blog, and this has worked wonderfully.

With the traffic that The Future Buzz now gets though, it was time to re-evaluate. Should this come across as a personal blog? Will there always be just one main writer? Is it time to put more emphasis on advertising?

With those thoughts in mind, we decided on a fundamental change to the layout. It was time to go from a personal blog to publication.

There are two main approaches you can take to get to a “publication” look. Let’s give them a more informal name here:

1. The New York Times / BBC approach.
2. The Smashing Magazine / Mashable approach.

The NY Times/BBC approach works well for sites with a team of authors and a lot of content published. The Future Buzz isn’t making a drastic leap to that, Adam is still going to be the #1 writer here and we still want to put full focus on the articles, so we chose the latter.

What About the Style?

We’ve talked about the functional reasons to redesign, but what about the visual ones? In the previous design, the major goal for the design was to look cool and professional. Blue and grey; color schemes don’t get much more professional than that.

In the new design though, Adam wanted to bring a lot more color into the site. The biggest complaint with the existing design was that it had simply gone too minimal and plain; it needed a little more zest to it.

This probably worked out as the biggest challenge with the design. As my partner eloquently put it, there’s a fine line between a vibrant colorful site, and a site selling children’s toys. We experimented a lot with this:

Our initial approach was a smaller step than Adam was looking for:

So we came back with plenty of variations, including some that went too far as well:

The end result was somewhere between the two extremes here (Which is a good sign we considered the range of options I think!)

When it comes to an intangible decision like this, then experimenting as much as possible is the only way to really make your choice. Forget planning it all out, just get stuck in and see what works.

Priorities, Priorities

In every project we do, we ask the client to list their priorities, in order. They can’t just give us a collection of things they want, it is numbered and there can only be one number 1.

This is crucial for us, because it forces everyone to see exactly where the priorities lie. Is the number 1 goal increasing subscribers, selling ads, building social profiles, selling products, or one of the hundred other goals a site might have?

With The Future Buzz, number one is still the community. There are a few more ads than before, but never in preference to the community. Let me give you an example of that:

This is a shot of the new sidebar. Community options first, ad second.

New Features

The site now includes a job board, which I’m sure Adam will be telling you all much more about. There are a lot of options about nowadays for setting up a job board, but Adam had discovered Simply Hired, who offered an extremely simple solution to set up.

Sometimes, the easiest solution really is the best. We could have invested a lot of time into building the perfect setup for the new site, only to find a few months later that a job board isn’t right for The Future Buzz.

That’s what makes Simply Hired the better choice; we have no investment upfront. If it doesn’t work out, we just remove it and no harm done. If it’s a big success, we can always come back later and build the ideal solution.

Aside from that, Adam came up with a nifty idea for comments. Beside each of your comments, you will see your total number of comments displayed (like in the previous design), but now your link color depends on your comments number as well. 100+ is gold, so that’s your target to aim for!

For anyone curious though, the code to display the total number of comments from a particular commenter is simple enough:

global $wpdb;
$count = $wpdb->get_var( $wpdb->prepare( “SELECT COUNT(*) FROM $wpdb->comments WHERE comment_author_email = %s AND comment_approved = 1″, get_comment_author_email() ) );

Then just echo $count; where you’d like the number displayed. Feel free to read up more on the $wpdb object if you’d like to know more about writing your own MySQL queries in WordPress!

So How Did We Do?

That should give you some oversight into how this new site came to be, so now I’d love to hear your thoughts on it all!

What have we done well? And what could we have done better? Let’s hear it in the comments!

How We Redesigned The Future Buzz is from The Future Buzz, a Blog Covering Digital Marketing

To accomplish this, the site definitely needs a refresh to minimize my name and place more emphasis on the brand of the blog and on the content / community. I also think a modern trade publication needs more of a visual identity, and so I’ve challenged my design team (Pro Blog Design) to do something more colorful and stylish yet still maintain the feel of the existing site.

So with that said, I am excited to share with you a sneak preview of the next rev of this site. This will be the fourth design iteration and I think the best yet.

Click the image below for a full size version:

Also – bonus for the community: we’ll be releasing the current theme as a free download for users (sans-logo). So if you dig the current look and want to use it for your own blog that will soon be possible.

We hope you enjoy the preview of the new design. Let us know what you think as this design is being done to improve your experience here.

Sneak Preview: The Future Buzz v 4.0 is from The Future Buzz, a Blog Covering Digital Marketing

The marketing and technology categories continue to buzz about Google+, Facebook, Twitter and other social outposts. Outposts are popular because they’re easy. Easy to setup because they don’t require any specialized skills, easy to make look nice since you’re coloring within the lines.

They’re all valuable and exciting networks. The social web as a whole continues to expand with more of them.

And yet…

Stream-based platforms are basically a problem in search of a solution. Everyone within them wants something to point at. Something unique, useful, interesting or creative that exists outside the stream. The stream’s purpose isn’t to talk about itself, rather to find things to talk about, comment on, amplify and share.

We talk a lot about the notion that every company is a media company. That’s still the opportunity that is staring you in the face and precisely why it is still a great time to start a blog. As social outposts grow in popularity, the ease of spreading new content and ideas just continues to increase. In fact, as the average user decides to forgo a self-hosted platform in favor of yielding their presence to the stream, this spells opportunity for the company or individual who is above average and willing to vest the effort to build a real web community.

Something else we’ve talked about is that stream based platform simply don’t foster the same type of community as one that is platform agnostic. To use networks you don’t own without having your own self-hosted destination that is updated with frequency and priority is to act tactically. You’re not building any momentum or an independent community this way.

Further, platforms are also exclusionary by nature. Not everyone uses every platform and that’s something a lot of people seem to miss. If you seek to penetrate an entire category and not simply a single network, then becoming a publisher is the answer.

Other benefits having a self-hosted blog has over any network you don’t own / self-host:

• Your own domain with clean URLs is still the most accessible, find-able and share-able asset on the web.
• Blog content can be shared across the web, in any way a user prefers.
• Media have become very comfortable directly reacting and linking to blog content, far more than any microcontent like a Tweet (ephemeral) or a Facebook status update (tough to link to).
• Self-installed analytics packages like Google Analytics or Omniture offer far more detailed and meaningful reports than any data from social sites and provide the full picture – all the way to conversion.
• Once sustainable traffic is build, you can point the firehose of traffic at any outpost and grow it.
• Three words: search engine traffic.
• With a blog, you can develop a truly creative, personalized design that is as you define it, not constrained by someone else’s rules.
• You can build opt in at the source, bypassing the noise of the real-time web and distribute content directly to high value (but unloved) email and RSS readers.
• On blogs, archives are valuable and continue to be re-shared and used to thread the past with the future. In stream-based platforms page 2 might as well be page 90.
• You can run calls to action next to your content and get to an outcome (leads generated, talent solicited, ads clicked – up to you!).
• Traffic is distributed with a self-hosted blog: if one source dies up, there are many more.

Don’t be shocked that the early adopters will continue to raise the “blogs are dead” meme into the future. And you’ll notice the most popular place they do this is on …you guessed it, other blogs. It’s an absurd conversation. You should ignore this and instead focus on reality: that the single best place to build a voice for you or your brand and dominate your category remains blogging.

Remember, you are not just another web user. As someone reading this site: whether a marketer, an artist or an entrepreneur, you’re hardly average. Rather you’re looking for the most potent approach to share ideas. I know it requires work, but to think doing so does not is naive.

The waves of change on the web don’t knock over the past unless your equity is tied up in a single network. A distributed presence not only provides accessibility, it provides security.

It’s still a great time to start a blog, but every day you wait is another day you fall behind savvy competitors who haven’t been taken in by hype or snake-oil types. If you have one already and it’s suffering because of other networks, why are you paying yourself last?

image credit: Shutterstock

Why It Is Still A Great Time To Start A Blog is from The Future Buzz, a Blog Covering Digital Marketing

With that said the goal of this blog when I started in 2007 was simple: to share my ideas and opinions with you. And I’ve greatly enjoyed doing that. I don’t plan to stop. Interestingly enough, however, the best part hasn’t even been publishing my ideas. Rather it has been inspiring discussions and bringing together an extremely bright group interested in digital media, marketing and PR.

So I have a new goal for the site: to become an essential destination for our category, driven by you, the community. How will we do this? In essence, I am planning to iterate The Future Buzz from my personal blog into something closer to a digital marketing industry trade. For existing subscribers you’re already setup and won’t need to change a thing. We’re just going to make things even better for you.

My sense is there is room in the market for a new type of trade publication. The existing ad, marketing and PR trades do great work writing up tips, trends and stories. I even contribute to some of them on occasion. A long tail of personal bloggers do an amazing job writing up the industry from their perspective. Several industry aggregators bring together the mix of our category.

But I think The Future Buzz can take a different approach, one that focuses relentlessly on creativity, community and passion for our industry. With 50K visitors per month and more than 22K subscribers opted in via RSS, email, Facebook and Twitter I think we have the numbers to become a meaningful and new type of trade.

You’ll notice over the past few months I’ve brought comments into the content mix and opened up the site to guest bloggers. These are just the first steps. I have many additional ideas to implement that will help amplify your thinking and give a voice to interested readers but in testing just a a few and getting feedback I’m excited to push this further.

Another critical next step is design. The current theme is minimal and perfect for what I wanted as a personal blog. But it won’t work for what’s next. I’m currently working through a new concept with the brilliant team of designers at Pro Blog Design. Expect something fresh and different.

Here’s where I need your help. I said this would be a different kind of trade publication. One of the reasons why is this will be a collaborative project. I know you’re interested in collaborating based on existing levels of participation and I’m hoping re-positioning this site as a trade vs. my personal blog will inspire even greater levels of this.

I’ve been gathering feedback at conferences, from industry friends and even coworkers. However I also want to ask you directly: what is it you want from a trade publication? Also what aren’t you getting from the current trades we can provide?

I’d love your subjective response as a comment below. This will help me push the site forward into the next iteration. If you’re too shy to comment, feel free to email me as I’d love to collect as many of your thoughts as possible so what I create next can be a shared vision from all of you.

Not a community member yet? Be sure to grab our RSS feed, follow us on Twitter or like us on Facebook so you don’t miss what’s next.

Help Input To The Next Iteration Of The Future Buzz is from The Future Buzz, a Blog Covering Digital Marketing