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mStoner’s Blog Turns 8

Intelligence

mStoner’s Blog Turns 8

Jun 13, 2011By Michael Stoner

While June 13th is otherwise not very remarkable for me, it is the day we launched this blog. Today marks its eighth birthday.

Way back in 2003, it was post dot.com but pre Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. Listservs were the social media of choice. There weren’t many other blogs focusing on education, education marketing, online marketing, the web in education.

Much has changed since then. But even in the age of Facebook, I don’t believe for a second that blogs are irrelevant. In fact, if you look at the winners of the CASE Circle of Excellence Awards for Social Media this year, you’ll see that 2011 is the year of the blog.

Perhaps that means that we are learning how important and strategic blogs can be for our institutional communications. This, five years after Debbie Weil (in The Corporate Blogging Book) encouraged bloggers in bsinesses and organizations, observing that: “We’re entering age of more open, honest, and authentic corporate communications.”

Indeed. How much more important these qualities are in 2011.

Since we launched, I’ve written 303 blog entries; my mStoner colleagues have written several hundred more. As I look over our blog, I believe that you can a pretty good sense of who we are and what we think about by scanning it.

And we’ve learned a few things about blogging in our eight years of doing it:

    1. Blogging takes focus and dedication. Even when multiple people contribute to a blog, it’s very hard to post regularly. Especially when our first priority is great client service.

 

    1. I’d rather we write smart posts, so I’ll trade nuance for frequency any day. And better fewer, smarter posts, than a lot of formulaic posts with titles like “11 thats about this” and “4 thises about that.”

 

    1. I write long blog posts: what can I say? People who read my blog entries would be shocked to know that I can communicate in 140 characters or fewer. If you don’t believe I can do it, follow me on Twitter.

 

    1. Anything we post about social media gets a lot of traffic.

 

One of our most popular posts is the one that Doug Gapinski wrote about pwireframing, which was featured on Smashing Mag. Doug’s post about pwireframing for mobile looks like it will also have enduring value.

My personal favorites are mStoner’s first law of branding, which was inspired by Barry Commoner’s first law of ecology and the post I wrote about Powered By Orange, which continues to draw a lot of traffic. [If you Google “Powered by Orange,” our post shows up as one of the top results.] I’m also partial to ‘Rethinking ‘Visitors’: Just Call Them ‘Friends’.” In it, I revisited an earlier post in which I suggested thinking of website “users” as “visitors” because it’s more welcoming and less mechanistic. But in an era defined by social media, “friends” is more appropriate.


  • Michael Stoner Co-Founder and Co-Owner Was I born a skeptic or did I become one as I watched the hypestorm gather during the dotcom years, recede, and congeal once more as we come to terms with our online, social, mobile world? Whatever. I'm not much interested in cutting edge but what actually works for real people in the real world. Does that make me a bad person?