I have two BIG #Blogchat announcements for y’all!  The first is that Ric Dragon will be co-hosting #Blogchat this Sunday!  Ric’s topic will be Blogging Time Management, and we’ll be discussing how to manage our time as bloggers and creating a productivity and work flow schedule.  Here’s how the chat will go:

1 – 8:00-8:30 Central – How do we create a schedule for our blog?  Should we spend 30 minutes a day on our blog?  An hour every other day?  How do we decide what to spend our time on?  Writing?  Researching?  How much time should you spend on blogging and what should you spend that time on?

2 – 8:30-9:00 Central – How do we repurpose existing content for our blog?  We’ll chat about how to take content like whitepapers etc already on our website and turn it into a blog post, or creating new blog posts from existing ones, etc.  I think this is an area that many of us (whether we are blogging for ourselves or an employer) do NOT think enough about!  There are many opportunities to create new blog posts from existing content, and Ric will help us figure out how to do that.

 

I’m super-excited about this as time management is a common problem that #Blogchat participants have, plus I’ve been wanting to have Ric co-host for a while now!  Please make sure you are following Ric on Twitter, plus check out his new book, Social Marketology, which is published by the good people at McGraw-Hill, who are also publishing Think Like a Rock Star!

Now the SECOND big #Blogchat announcement is that Pilot Pen is the official #Blogchat sponsor for August!  And it’s just in time as next week Pilot Pen will launch a pretty interesting campaign that I think many bloggers will be interested in.  It’s the Power of The Pen campaign, and I’ll be participating here next week as well.  Here’s the details:

Monday, 8/6 is when Pilot Pen will commence “Think in Ink Week/#ThinkinInk Week” which roots in the importance of using pens — particularly Pilot pens — to write, draw, create, inspire, etc.

Here’s the guidelines:

• Only post handwritten blog posts during the entirety or for a portion of the week of August 6th (using photos of your handwritten posts, of course
• Allot one post next week to either: A. Focus on either giving advice to the youth of today (about writing, creativity, doing what you love, etc.) or B. Craft an open letter to your younger self. For example…What would you do differently if you could redo your youth? What was the most  valuable lesson you learned? What are you most proud of? Who was influential to you?

So instead of writing out a blog post as usual, if you’re involved in this campaign, you’ll write out your post with a pen, and then take a picture of it and post it!  I think it’s pretty creative and I can’t wait to see what everyone comes up with!  Does that mean I have to draw a picture for my written post?  Oops….I guess it does 😉

If you’d like to be involved in the Power of the Pen campaign, check it out at their site, and learn how you can join in next week.

So thanks so much to Ric for co-hosting Sunday (starting at 8pm Central!)  and for Pilot Pen sponsoring #Blogchat in August, I’m super excited about both!

This Sunday I’m super-excited to have C.C. Chapman join us to co-host #Blogchat!  Our topic will be How to Create Content For Your Blog During a Family Vacation.  I wanted C.C. to co-host on this topic because he does a LOT of traveling and gets to play with a LOT of cool content creation tools, so he can give us some great insights into both areas!

Here’s how the topic will break down:
1 – From 8:00pm CT – 8:30pm, we’ll chat about planning your trip so you have enough time to do everything you want, but also think about opportunities to create content.

2 – From 8:30pm-9:00pm, C.C. will talk to us about some of his favorite content creation tools.  I’m really excited about this because C.C. is constantly using the newest and latest toys, and is a great photographer.  So if any of you have any questions about taking better pictures, make sure you ask C.C.!

BTW this is great timing for C.C. to be co-hosting #Blogchat as his new book, Amazing Things Will Happen is now available for pre-order!  Looks to be another great book from C.C., and I’m looking forward to checking it out!

And if you aren’t already, don’t forget to follow C.C. on Twitter!

And don’t forget that Club Med will be sponsoring #Blogchat for the entire month of July.  And the best part for you is that at the end of the month they will be giving away a 7-night stay for 4 at one of their resorts! The winner can choose to take their stay at either Sandpiper Bay in Florida, or Turkoise in the Caribbean.  In order to be eligible to win this trip, you need to do two things:

1 – Follow @ClubMedOfficial on Twitter.

2 – Participate in every #Blogchat in the month of July.

That’s it!  If you do those two things, you’re in the running to win the trip, and the winner will be announced shortly after the July 29th #Blogchat ends!  If you have any questions, please tweet @ClubMedOfficial, and look for them during #Blogchat as they are super nice and helpful!

Hope to see everyone on Sunday at 8pm Central!

This Sunday’s #Blogchat will discuss how blogging companies can drive more sales from their blog!  This is a big concern for many blogging companies, as they are struggling to get sales or leads or donors or whatever from their blog.  Companies want to see that their blogging efforts are creating value for their business and although there are many ways to do this, cash is still king 😉

So as we are discussing this topic on Sunday, one thing I want us to do is put our customer’s hat on, and think about the things that are keeping us from buying from most blogging companies.  What could a company change about its blog that would make you more interested in buying from them?

Better product information?  Better contact information?  More valuable and relevant content?  Maybe if the blog did a better job of asking for the sale?  Be thinking about some of the areas where most blogging companies could do a better job of earning your business, and we’ll talk about that on Sunday!  BTW for those of you that are looking for advice on how to monetize your blog, this will be the perfect topic for you to pick up some pointers!

Also keep in mind that Club Med is sponsoring #Blogchat all month, and they are giving away a trip for 4 at the end of the month!  In order to be eligible to win the trip, you must follow @ClubMedOfficial on Twitter, plus participate in #Blogchat each week.  That’s it!  Looking forward to seeing everyone on Sunday at 8pm Central, 9pm Eastern!

I’m so excited to have Alexis Grant join us this Sunday as #Blogchat co-host!  One of the topics that is constantly suggested by #Blogchat participants is how to get guest posts accepted by other bloggers.  Alexis is perfect to help us with this as one of the many professional hats she wears is that of editor for the site Brazen Careerist!  Alexis reviews the constant stream of guest post submissions that come to her, and she’ll walk us through how we can get our guest post ideas published!

And to get us started, Alexis has already written a prep post for this Sunday, 7 Tips For Placing Guest Posts on High-Traffic Blogs!

As you know when we have co-hosts, we break the main topic down into 2 sub-topics, which we discuss for 30 minutes each.  Here’s our schedule for Sunday with Alexis:

1 – From 8:00pm Central – 8:30 pm, we’ll discuss the elements of a great guest post.  Alexis will show us what should be included in our guest post in order to get it accepted by the blogs we are targeting.

2 – From 8:30pm – 9:00pm, we’ll discuss how to pitch our guest post idea, what we need to focus on, how to present our idea, etc.

That’s it!  To prepare for this Sunday’s #Blogchat, please make sure you are following Alexis on Twitter!

 

Finally, Sunday begins Club Med’s sponsorship of #Blogchat for July!  As I announced earlier this week, Club Med will be sponsoring #Blogchat for the entire month of July.  And the best part for you is that at the end of the month they will be giving away a 7-night stay for 4 at one of their resorts! The winner can choose to take their stay at either Sandpiper Bay in Florida, or Turkoise in the Caribbean.  In order to be eligible to win this trip, you need to do two things:

1 – Follow @ClubMedOfficial on Twitter.

2 – Participate in every #Blogchat in the month of July.

That’s it!  If you do those two things, you’re in the running to win the trip, and the winner will be announced shortly after the July 29th #Blogchat ends!  If you have any questions, please tweet @ClubMedOfficial, and look for them during #Blogchat as they are super nice and helpful!

Hope to see everyone on Sunday at 8pm Central!

I have three BIG announcements for #Blogchat in July!  The first is that Club Med will be the official sponsor for #Blogchat in July!  Club Med offers vacation resorts in several locations around the world!  Club Med is also considered the original all-inclusive resort, and one of the most recognizable brands in the world!

So I know what you’re thinking, ‘So Mack, does this mean Club Med is going to give away a trip to one of its resorts? ;)’

Uh yeah, that’s exactly what it means!  As part of Club Med’s sponsorship of #Blogchat in July, they will give away a 7-night stay at a resort for 4 people!  ONE lucky winner will receive a stay at their choice of two different Club Med resorts:

Sandpiper Bay, Florida – This resort is located in Florida and perfect for families and offers plenty of sports and family-related activities.  It also has the only L’occitane Spa in North America.

Turkoise in the Caribbean –  This resort is for singles and couples and located on the island of Providenciales, in the Caribbean Sea.  It is known for its beautiful beaches and snorkeling.

The winner will be responsible for travel, and can claim the prize for up to one year, or till July 31st, 2013.  In order to be eligible to win the trip, you need to do two things:

1 – Follow Club Med on Twitter

2 – Participate in #Blogchat from 8pm-9pm Central each Sunday in July.

That’s it!  On July 29th shortly after the OPEN MIC #Blogchat ends, we’ll announce the winner!  So please follow @ClubMedOfficial on Twitter and participate in #Blogchat in July, and you’re in the running to win a trip to either Turkoise or Sandpiper Bay!

And now it’s time to cue the cheezy cable informercial guy voice: But wait, there’s MORE!

In July we will have not one but TWO special co-hosts!

The July 1st #Blogchat will kick off Club Med’s sponsorship, but it is also the night we will welcome Alexis Grant as co-host to help us learn how to Get Your Guest Posts Accepted!  This is a topic that y’all have been asking about for a while, and I said I wanted to wait till I found the perfect co-host for us!  Alexis fits the bill, as she is a digital strategist, but also the editor of Brazen Careerist!  Alexis gets pitched constantly from bloggers that want to write guest posts for Brazen Careerist, so she’ll walk us through how to craft the perfect pitch for our guest post submissions, plus how to decide what to write about!

Then on July15th, we welcome back C.C. Chapman as co-host!  Our topic on July 15th will be How to Create Content During Your Family Vacation.  I think this will be a very interesting topic as C.C. does a lot of traveling with his family, and he’ll give us some tips for not only creating content during our vacations, but also how to balance our time between recording our memories, and making those memories!  Of course, C.C. wrote THE book on content creation along with the fantabulous Ann Handley, The Content Rules!

The topics for July 8th and 22nd haven’t been set yet, but I’ll post them on Twitter and #Blogchat’s Facebook page as soon as they are!  I’m so grateful to have Club Med on as sponsor and so excited that Alexis and C.C. can join us PLUS for the topics they’ll be teaching us about!  And very happy that one of you will win a very kickass vacation!

So it looks like we are in for a big July with #Blogchat, and guess what, there’s more big #Blogchat announcements coming soon 😉

Next Sunday we will be discussing Blogging Time Management, as suggested by Patrick Phillips.  Patrick noticed that over the past week or so that several people in #Blogchat were talking about how to find time for blogging, when they preferred to write, etc.  So we’ll go with Patrick’s suggestion, and here’s the link to follow him on Twitter.

I wanted to try something different this week.  Typically, 30 mins before #Blogchat starts, I ask everyone to share a link to their blog so we can connect.  But I thought it would be educational (and fun!) if instead we each talked about how we manage our own blogging efforts and writing, and then on Sunday we can share our posts and compare notes.  So that’s what I wanted to do here, and I encourage you to do the same on your own blog!

Now for the past month or so my blogging has taken a bit of a backseat as I’ve been working on writing Think Like a Rockstar.  Currently I’m writing about 1-2 posts a week, where before I wrote 3-4 a week.  I plan on going back to that schedule soon.

So here’s how I manage my blogging.  First, I do most of my writing either late at night, or first thing in the morning.  Ideally, I will write my post the night before, and set it to publish the following morning at 8am.  If I haven’t come up with a post idea by the end of the day, the following morning around 7am or so I will check my Google Reader and scan the blogs and sites I am subscribed to.  If I can’t find any inspiration from reading those blogs and sites, then I go about my day.  One thing I learned the hard way is that if I don’t have anything to say that day, then I DON’T PUBLISH A NEW POST.  It’s far better to go a couple of days without posting and then run a great post, than it is to run three straight mediocre posts.  If I’m not feeling it today, then I won’t blog and we’ll see how it goes tomorrow.

Now I typically only focus on blogging from Monday through Thursday.  Occasionally I will post on Friday, and sometimes on Sunday, but almost never on Saturdays.  I follow this pattern because in watching my traffic patterns I’ve learned that the best days for traffic on here are in the middle of the week, Tuesday through Thursday.  So I focus on blogging on those days first.  If I can write a 4th post, it will typically go on Monday, then a 5th post would be on either Sunday or Friday.

So that’s how I manage time for my blog.  Typically, I will invest about an hour for writing a post.  If I can’t come up with a great post after about 60 mins, I move on.  Finding ideas for posts is usually the hardest part for me, after I have the idea, the post pretty much writes itself.

What about you?  When do you spend time writing for your blog?  Every day?  Morning?  Evening?  Weekends?  Please share what works for you on your blog, so we can all share our results this coming Sunday at the next #Blogchat!  And if you do write a post on how you manage your blogging and want to share a link in the comments, feel free!

BTW if you’ve never joined #Blogchat before, here’s what it’s all about!

Last week I got to spend 3 days in Austin for Bazaarvoice’s Social Summit.  Bazaarvoice flew me in and paid me to do a Live #Blogchat on Wednesday night to kick off the event.  For the first time, we combined Twitter with the Live #Blogchat experience, and although there were some technical issues at first, the actual #Blogchat itself went fairly smoothly.  In fact, I think this format has a lot of potential and I’ll start packaging similar offerings to companies that are interested in doing Live #Blogchats in the future.

As for the Social Summit itself, let me give you a bit of background on this event before I share my takeaways.  Primarily, this event was designed for Bazaarvoice’s current and potential clients.  Many of the speakers were from Bazaarvoice’s clients, which were large companies.  Several very large brands spoke and presented some of the work they were doing in the social, digital and mobile realms, including Home Depot, 3M, Wal-Mart, Xerox, IBM and Google.  So it was a great barometer for how truly big brands are using these emerging technologies, with a heavy emphasis on social media.

With that in mind, here were some of my takeaways from these brands and what they shared, as well as the event itself:

1 – The discussion has moved past ‘Social Media 101’ for big brands.  This was a very social-savvy crowd, and in fact several of the presenters and attendees mentioned their company knew the basics of social media.  This makes complete sense, because larger brands typically have teams devoted to social media, whereas small businesses (for example) can’t allocate as much attention to the tools, and need more hand-holding.

2 – Eagerness to adopt social media varies by department in each company.  Typically, the departments that have direct involvement with customers on a daily basis are the ones that understand the need for social media adoption, and are its internal cheerleaders.  I did think there was an interesting takeaway from Ron Secrist, the Director of Social and Emerging Channels for Capital One.  He explained that Capital One isn’t using social media as well as he would like because the brand is having difficulty understanding how to integrate social into its tv commercials, which are such a huge part of its advertising approach.  Two words: Twitter hashtags.

3 – Big brands are desperate to learn how to increase engagement with their customers via social media.  One of the things I like to do when I attend conferences is look at which topics and sessions are the best attended because that typically suggests which areas attendees need help with.  There were two sessions directly covering building engagement via social media, and both were completely full with many people standing up at the back of the room, and in the doorways.  The second engagement session I attended on Friday was actually opposite a session on Social Media ROI, but it was still SRO.  This was clearly THE topic that attendees wanted help with.

Bazaarvoice upped the bar for connecting attendees and generating buzz among them and on Twitter

One reason why I like doing recap posts like this of the events I present at and attend is to give other event planners some ideas for how they can create a better experience for their conference or event.  There’s two things Bazaarvoice did with the Social Summit that I thought were really ingenious that I wanted to spotlight.

1 – Bazaarvoice created a special mobile app just for Social Summit attendees.  This app for the iPhone, iPad and Android gave attendees an easy way to get information about the event as well as tweet and connect with each other.  Ian Greenleigh, Bazaarvoice’s Social Media Manager, tweeted that the app generated over 4,700 tweets in 3 days!  Another thing that I thought was brilliant was Bazaarvoice added a Leaderboard so everyone could track who was the most active with the app, and prizes were awarded to the top users!  The app was created by DoubleDutch, and from scanning Tweetdeck during the conference (which shows what source tweets come from, ie web, smartphone, etc), it looked like about half of all tweets with #bsocial12 conference hashtag were going through the Summit app.  That’s pretty impressive.

2 – Bazaarvoice Livestreamed Social Summit plus embedded #bsocial12 tweets.  This was another smart move to not only build buzz at the event, but to generate interest for attending next year’s event from those that watched at home.  The livestreaming of sessions part is nothing new, but I thought it was cool that Bazaarvoice also embedded #bsocial12 tweets on the same page PLUS had a box where you could tweet directly from the livestream page, which was also prefilled with the #bsocial12 hashtag!  In fact during the Live #Blogchat they changed it so the box prefilled your tweets with both the #bsocial12 and #blogchat hashtags.  Really a great example of generating buzz and online word of mouse about the event.

Overall, Social Summit was a very interesting and well-run event.  It’s good to occasionally attend an event where I’m not seeing all the same speakers and hearing all the same case studies.  Social Summit gave me a different and more company-centric perspective on digital technologies, and it was honestly a breath of fresh air.  Thanks so much to my friends Erin Nelson and Ian Greenleigh for bringing me in for Social Summit and I hope I can return next year!

If you attended the Social Summit, what were some of your biggest takeaways?