750 posts

750 posts My WordPress dashboard tells me I’ve written 750 posts since I began this blog exactly thirteen years ago. At least one new post every week since 2009. I have a few thoughts.

Surprise and delight

If you had told me back in November 2009 that I would be posting on this blog every week for the next 13 years I would not have believed you. I’d be sure that I would have run out of things worth saying. Yet I am still writing weekly posts — over half a million words to date! — with a healthy set of new ideas biding their time in drafts.

Did I underestimate my creative ability? Could I not see that my lifelong curiosity would guarantee the ongoing discovery of new things to write about? Did my initial difficulty putting pen to paper convince me that I’d never be able to keep up the effort to write something new week after week?

Probably all of the above. Educated in a Victorian-era environment, I was taught that creative people were artists and poets, not scientists like me. As a lifelong learner, I’ve always been curious and asked questions, so it turned out I will always be learning new things about the world and myself, some of which may be worth sharing. And after struggling for four years to write my first book, it was natural to assume that writing would always be hard for me.

So I’m surprised and delighted that I still have something to say. However, whether I would have kept writing continually since 2009 depends on an additional factor.

Gratitude

In 2009, about a million new blogs were started. As far as I know, no one was blogging about meeting design. There weren’t any obvious ways to let anyone know what I was writing about. Googling “meeting design” returned hits about meetings for designers. In 2009, this website received a mere 24,238 page views. Was I wasting my time?

Well, apparently not. The following year somehow brought in over 400,000 page views. The popularity of this website grew steadily, and it now gets about five million page views annually, putting it in the top one million active websites.  Not bad for a niche site on a topic that few people ever think about!

And this growth has come about from tens of thousands of folks who have visited, subscribed to, and linked to my posts. ~1,300 subscribers get an email whenever I post. Social media, especially Twitter, brings significant traffic. And search engines are no longer flummoxed by the concept that people want well-designed meetings.

I am so grateful. Grateful to you: my subscribers, the folks who share my posts, and the thousands of people who have purchased my books. Without your engagement, support, and continuous encouragement, I would have given up long ago.

And, of course, I’m grateful for the friendships that have grown between us, the in-person and online experiences we’ve had together, and the community that we’ve developed over the years.

Love

Speaking of community brings me to love. Yes, love. We don’t talk much about love in the professional sphere. Isn’t it a little unseemly? Expression of pleasure and happiness is okay, but being genuinely effusive about loving your work might be awkward.

And, sure, most of us—me included—have spent time or are still spending time doing work that we really don’t fundamentally love. Which is a shame, even if it’s virtually unavoidable.

I have been blessed with finding work that I truly love to do.

(No, not every minute of every day of course. Writing posts, for example, isn’t always the most pleasant activity when you’re driven to share something new just about every Monday morning.)

For the last thirteen years, designing and facilitating hundreds of events, writing books that have influenced how meetings are thought about and held, and sharing a growing body of (now) 750 posts have been a privilege and a pleasure!

I love what I’ve done, the community that has made it possible, and the possibilities of an unknown future.

What more could I want?

I love you all.

Friends don’t let friends give away their content

control of your content: A graphic combining an article with the headline "Medium lays off 50 employees, shuts down New York and D.C. offices"; with a cel from the Doonesbury comic strip of July 24th, 2016 featuring Zonker and Zipper staring at a computer screenFriends don’t let friends give away their original content to third-party platforms
I’ve been saying this for years, but do people listen? No, they don’t. Don’t give away control of your content.

Let me be clear. By all means share your content for free on any of the gazillion social media platforms available. And if you can get paid appropriately for creating content for others, good for you. Otherwise, make sure that your content remains under your control. Don’t give away control of your content.

Why? Well, here are a few reminders:

  • Geocities was once the third most visited site on the internet. 38 million user-built pages! Nothing but a distant memory now, unless you live in Japan.
  • Remember when your friends saw everything you posted on Facebook? Not anymore, unless you pay up.
  • Ah, those glorious days when you posted something in a LinkedIn group and a significant number of people would read it! Long gone.

Now the blog host site Medium has announced a layoff of a third of its staff. There are millions of posts on the site. Will Evan Williams pull the plug? Will social journalism survive? Who knows?

Get the picture? Posting your original content exclusively on someone else’s platform puts you at their mercy. Don’t do it!

Instead, invest in your own website

There are plenty of great platforms available, and lots of fine web hosting services to run them on. For example, this site uses WordPress on a Dreamhost VPS (Virtual Private Server).

Though this route involves more work and/or money than posting on a third-party platform, you:

  • Control your own content. You can add, edit, delete, and control comments on it at any time.
  • Determine how your content is presented. Want to insert an offer for your services or products in the middle of a blog post? No problem.
  • Retain full rights to your content. (One example: the rights to anything you post to Huffington Post belongs to them. And they don’t even pay you for the privilege of writing for them!)
  • Build your own brand, authority, and SEO, not that of a third-party site.
  • Maintain access to your content. If your web hosting service goes bankrupt or is unsatisfactory, you can transfer your content to a new host. As long as the internet is up and you pay your hosting service, your content will be available.

16 years ago I started the Conferences That Work website you’re reading. As expected, hardly anyone visited initially. As I steadily added content (at least once per week) viewership grew. Currently [2017], according to my weblogs, this site is the most popular website on meeting design and related issues, with 31 million page views to date, 25 million of which were made in the last three years.

As a result, this website is now the largest source of client inquiries for my consulting and facilitating services — something I would never have predicted when it went live in 2009. The ever-growing body of articles on this blog and the inbound links to them continue to build my brand, authority, and SEO.

This has been a PSA from Adrian Segar.

I and thou: blogging as if a person was actually there

I and thou.I and thou: a black-and-white photograph of Martin Buber

All actual life is encounter.
Martin Buber, I and Thou (1923)

I finally realized why certain bloggers irritate me.

A lot.

Even if I agree with much of what they say.

It’s simple.

They never write as if they were there.

These bloggers always present themselves as authorities. The way they write implies they speak THE TRUTH.

Personal stories do not appear in their posts.

Perhaps this is a reaction to my years of lectured-to schooling, the fantasy I was encouraged to believe (only eventually dispelled by my experience) that everything had THE RIGHT ANSWER if I was only smart enough to hear and understand it.

Well, I don’t care.

§——————————————§

When I feel even a splinter of the authentic self come through a blogger’s writing, even if I don’t agree with them at all, something changes. The person appears to me by choosing to enter into relationship through their writing. They become vulnerable and appealing.

We become connected.

I like that.

A lot.

When a person hides behind their words, streaming out some truth as if it were divinely inspired, I feel a void.

§——————————————§

Bloggers—all writers for that matter—let us know who you are.

I and thou.

We want to know you.

Tip: How to live blog a public conference session without going crazy

live blog a public conference: photograph of a conference participant blogging on their computer. Photo attribution: Flickr user catspyjamasnzHere’s a simple idea, courtesy of edACCESS colleague Bill Campbell, that can come in real handy when you want to live blog a public conference session without devoting most of your time to keeping up with what the speaker or participants are saying.

Crowdsource your event recording! How? Before the session, create a public Google Doc, shorten the weblink to the document, and publish the shortened URL on the Twitter feed for the event and/or on the projection screen in the room before the session starts, together with a request to help out with session notes. Anyone with the web link will be able to log in and help share the work of documenting the session.

Do you ever live blog a public conference session this way? Share your experience in the comments below!

Photo attribution: Flickr user catspyjamasnz