Tips for helping your career through promotion

This continues my series on professional networking.

If you don’t think promotion should be part of journalism, I understand. I did little to nothing to promote myself or my work in the first 20-plus years of my career. And I had a good career: rewarding mid-level editor jobs and senior reporting jobs at metro newspapers, top editor of a smaller newspaper.

I can’t think of a single self-promotional thing I did for the first two decades of my career, unless you count some internal boasting in newsroom chit-chat or an occasional humble brag to make sure the boss knew my role in a story.

I didn’t do anything to actually promote myself (that I can recall) until 1997. And I think my career since has benefited greatly from self-promotion, and from overcoming a strong journalistic resistance to promotion.

I decided in 1997 that I wanted to train journalists and get paid for doing so. I thought I had something to teach journalists after all those years of work, and I thought I would like training, and I could use the money. And no one would know that I was available to do training if I didn’t promote myself.

So I developed my first website, promoting my training services and posting workshop handouts online. I was taking a web design class under Father Don Doll at Creighton University, and my website was all about me and my training services.

But that was early in the history of the web and well before Google, so I also developed an amateurish flier promoting my services (design was never a strong suit of mine). I mailed that flier to newsrooms and press associations around the Midwest and landed three training gigs: with the York News-Times (a Nebraska daily not to be confused with the New York Times), the North Dakota Newspaper Association and the Minot Daily News. Since I was a former Minot editor and well known to the folks at NDNA, those gigs came through a mix of networking and promotion. But I didn’t know anyone at York, and that first training gig came from the amateurish flier.

Read Full Post »

SlideShare: a niche social site that extends your reach

Update: Now the #twutorial slides are on SlideShare’s “most popular” page, with more than 14,000 views.

SlideShare ranks way behind Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest and lots of other social tools in the social media pecking order. But some slides I posted there last week (above) got more views than all but one blog post I ever wrote. And a slide show I posted last year got more views than any blog post I ever wrote.

My experience with SlideShare shows how even second-tier or third-tier social tools offer important engagement opportunities that journalists, educators and trainers should keep in mind.

I am as likely as anyone to make fun of PowerPoint presentations. I’m more likely to be annoyed by someone who reads his slides to me than I am to remember a speaker’s slide presentation. I’ve never browsed SlideShare myself to look at others’ slides and I seldom browse very far into a deck when I find one online with a blog post or linked to from a tweet or Facebook update. I’m not the audience of SlideShare, but I certainly am a user.

I believe in results. And SlideShare metrics show that slides work for some people. So I keep using slides in my workshops and SlideShare keeps showing those slides to far more people than my workshops reach (my 130 presentations and other documents have more than 220,000 views on SlideShare).

Read Full Post »

September 2011 was the biggest traffic month ever on my blog

This is a trivial and self-indulgent blog post about my blog. I’ll share some facts and observations about the busiest month ever on my blog, 17,635 page views, passing my previous record of 16,119, set in June:

• Joining Journal Register Co. has significantly boosted traffic to my blog. Five of my seven busiest months, including the four busiest, in terms of traffic have been since I went to work for JRC in June.
• Posts about social media, especially Twitter, have always attracted good traffic on this blog. My live-tweeting post (Sept.6) drew the most traffic for the month, 2,171. Second was my Sept. 17 post on persuading curmudgeons to use Twitter, 1,437. Fourth was my Sept. 8 post listing social media resources for journalists, 1,138. Even my Aug. 19 Twitter tips for journalists continued to do well in September, 733. And my Aug. 25 post on engaging through newsroom Twitter accounts got 331 September views. My Sept. 1 post, encouraging sports staffs to promote and curate Friday Night Tweets, didn’t do as well, just 241. Various other new and old Twitter-related posts combined for more than 1,000 views. Altogether, that’s more than one-third of my traffic coming to posts relating to Twitter.

Read Full Post »

Entrepreneurial journalists need to master social media

Our entrepreneurial journalism class at Georgetown will be discussing social media the next two weeks. Of course, you could do a whole course on social media, which offer some of the most important tools an entrepreneurial journalist will use, so this will be an overview more than a deep dive.

Social media can be part of the solution for all three of the key challenges an entrepreneurial journalist faces: content, distribution and monetization.

Read Full Post »

A decade’s experience in news, training, innovation

This decade is ending with much less fanfare than the past one, which was the turn of both a century and a millennium.

This decade passed without really getting a name — the Oughts didn’t quite stick, like I guess they did a century earlier (they so didn’t stick that I don’t even know or care whether Oughts or Aughts would be the preferred spelling).

If you don’t have much patience for self-indulgent reflections, this might be a good time to go read something else, because I’m going to look back on the past decade of my career.

Read Full Post »

10 tips on using social media for business

Whatever your business or profession and whatever social tools you are using, these tips apply in most social media situations:

1. Decide what your goal is in using each social media tool and reassess from time to time how well the tool is serving that goal.

Read Full Post »

SlideShare: Learning another social media tool

The challenge of mastering social media is that you never get there. You always have to learn something new.

My newest social-networking platform is SlideShare. This is a place to post presentations on PowerPoint and other slide-show programs. When I was training at the American Press Institute, people frequently asked for my slideshows. They were big and I seldom emailed them when people requested the slides for seminars where I traveled. For API seminars at our headquarters in Reston, Va., we burned slides and handouts to CD’s for par participants and they seemed to appreciate it.

Read Full Post »