6 Months

So today is the official 6 month anniversary of when I started this blog.  I'm going to follow Kyle's lead and do a bit of reflection.  Unlike Kyle, this was not my first foray into professional blogging.  Some of you know I ran a blog called Interactive Recruiting for a while.  The content was pretty much exactly like this one (except that it focused exclusively on emarketing in admissions) and it had a decent readership.  Then one day, it up and disappeared.  I refer to this as the day I dropped off the face of the earth. 

So what happened.  Some of you know this and some don't.  Long story short, I was yanked into my former boss's office one day and was told that if I wanted to keep that blog up (a blog I was maintaining on my own time and with my own resources) that they were going to require me to run every post through them so that they could edit it and sign off on it before it was posted.  They referred to this as "helping me" and said they could do it because "my job was my identity".  The real reason, of course, is that I'm opinionated as hell and they didn't want me to be (military school mentality - if you're not a sheep, you're asking for trouble).  Now, those who know me know that noting drives me more batty than censorship so I went home that night, had a few cocktails and up and deleted the thing.  I also decided that it was time for me to quit my job and honestly wasn't sure if I even wanted to be in higher ed anymore, the whole thing just left such a sour taste in my mouth.  I didn't tell anyone what was going on (except Matt because I had been scheduled to present with him at HighEdWebDev and needed to pull out).  I don't regret deleting the blog.  To me, taking an ethical stance is far more important than maintaining an online identity and I wouldn't have been able to live with myself if I had allowed the "editing" to occur.  What I *d0* regret is not saving any of my posts from it so when I decided to start this one, I was starting over again from scratch.

So why do I tell this story - when I first started this blog about a few months later, I was scared as hell.  If you look back to earlier posts (and before I had my bio up or anything), you'll see that I never mentioned where I worked by name.  I really liked my new job (and still do!) but still hadn't quite adjusted to the fact that I wasn't working at a military school any longer and that it was now OK to have an opinion.  I didn't want to ruffle any feathers so my posts for the first few months were really quite innocuous.  Eventually, I calmed down.  My boss is amazingly supportive, even when she disagrees or doesn't understand something I've posted.  Instead of insisting that she should be allowed to edit my blog, we have a discussion about it.  We may not end up agreeing, but that's OK.  Now I feel completely comfortable coming on here and expressing a point of view, which I think makes the blog far more interesting than it was when I first started.     

What I've learned about blogging in the last 6 months: 

1. You need to blog for yourself - not for anyone else.  A blog is a labor of love in a lot of respects and if you're going to do it, you shouldn't even bend to the whim of what you think other people want you to write about.
2. Post often.  It's near impossible to post every day (I tried it for a while!) but you also can't let a month go by without a post if you actually want people to be engaged.
3. Respond to comments.  I'm always amazed when I go to blogs and the authors never respond to readers comments!  Why even start a blog if you don't want to have conversations?
4. People are going to disagree with you - and that's OK.  I actually had already learned this lesson from political blogging.  I joke a lot that I'm the "higher ed web bitch" so expressing further opinions that I know people are going to disagree with is easy.  I'm not threatened when people don't feel the same way I do about an issue, but a lot of people out there are. Still, if everyone agrees all the time, what's the point in talking in the first place?
5. For some people, content doesn't matter.  This was a new one for me and one I'm hoping to move beyond at this point - to some people, the content of what I say actually matters less than how long I've owned this domain name.  I'm not considered a reputable source of information until I've been around for 6 months.  Sad but true. 

My Favorite Blogs from the past 6 months

(in order of date they were posted)

• MIT Does it Right (this isn't really a substantive post, but it is a really fun game that you should all go play.)
  
• Email Basics
  
• Live blogging the Edward Tufte Seminar, Part 1 and Part 2
  
• Show Me The Money!!!!!
  
• The Wired Wealthy Report: Review and Takeaways
  
• Assigning Value to Determine ROI
  
• It's Your Job to be In The Know
  
• Building an admissions email marketing plan, part 1: The Five Commandments
  
• Integrating print, web and email
  
• Segmenting and integrating Facebook Social Ads
  
• An Event Apart, Day 1 and Day 2 and reflections
• Numbers mean nothing without context

And thanks to those who read :-)

I'm humbled by the people who read this blog and the feedback I get from you.  I always say that I do this for myself (and I do) but it truly makes it worthwhile to know that I've helped people to think about things in different ways.  Some people who blog consider themselves to be influencers or rock stars or whatever...I'm none of that.  I'm just a girl sitting in an office or at home on her couch hacking away at a computer and am amazed that people find my musings worthwhile enough to spend time reading.  I hope I can give you another 6 months worth of valuable material (and maybe even a bit more than that if I'm lucky!).

So thanks.  You rock my world :-)

Karlyn