- by Alena Hitzemann, Associate Web Editor

Sometimes it's hard to practice what you preach.

I, for instance, often preach to other BMC bloggers about blogging best practices. I evangalize on the importance of posting often. I tell them that once a week is a good goal (especially given busy corporate schedules) but more frequently is even better. I talk about the blog as a more casual forum that doesn't require a perfectly crafted essay, but should instead reflect your own voice (with good grammar, of course.) I use the words "brevity" and "succinct" a lot. I say that sharp, brief and original thoughts are often better than long, drawn out treatises, particularly if you can produce them quickly.

And yet here I am: my last post almost a month ago. I'm not doing so well on the brevity front, either.

I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in this boat. Work gets busy, and the work that you want to do isn't always the work that you need to do. It appears that walking the walk is slighly more challenging than talking the talk. But I'm a Gen Yer, and we're an idealistic bunch. It's very important to me to balance those wants (read, write, think) with the needs (8 million other things.) So I'm buckling down, determined to follow my own advice and heed the recommendations that I so glibly dispense.

That is the What: write more often, be more succinct, practice what you preach. But what about the easier-said-than-done piece? What about the How?

I've been trying to come up with ways to get it done. Here are the steps that I'm hoping to follow for more consistent and efficient blogging.

• Write when your head is clear. Do you think best in the morning or afternoon? When do your ideas hit, when do you feel energetic and articulate? Notice when your brain feels particularly sharp and capitalize on it. It will be easier, faster and more fun to write during those times.

• Block off time. Put it on your calendar, mark the time "busy" and make yourself stick to it. Yes, other things come up. But holding time for blogging sends the message to yourself and your co-workers that this is an important activity. In turn, you will garner more respect for your blog, build it into a more respectable space, and respect yourself for your diligence and brilliance.

• Be spontaneous. This is the flip side to "block off time." If you come across a news article or blog post and really need to express your opinions on it thisverysecond- make it happen. Your passion and enthusiasm will come through, plus timely posts are more naturally viral.

• Use metrics. Following your number of hits, visits, views, comments, etc. can be a great and addicting motivator. High numbers? Awesome, don't want to let down your readers! Low numbers? Better buckle down and build that fan base.

• Repurpose. Take advantage of your other projects. The research that you did for your boss, that report that you just put together, your most recent ppt... they all contain information and ideas that will be valuable to your readers, too. You did the work, make it work for you.
  

• Take notes. I'm a sucker for forgetting great ideas that pop up at random times. To combat this, I've started scribbling down nuggets of insight whenever they strike and keeping all the scribbles in one place. Looking through them reminds me what bulb went off during that last meeting and how it connects to the post I've been writing in my head.

• Step away. If you're struggling to find the right words or clarify an idea, take a break. Have a snack, walk around, do something else. I often find that when I return to the screen, my thoughts fall quickly into place. (This works for crossword puzzles, too.)

• Get inspired. Feeling flat? Spend some time looking for things that set off a spark. Really think about the information you're consuming- your favorite blogs, news sites, podcasts, good music, a chat with a friend, whatever- and what that information means to you.

• Connect work to life. And vice versa. Thinking about concepts through various lenses often effects particularly interesting results. Plus, your readers want to know who you are as a person. Sharing things about your life or your work with your audience will help them understand the many angles of your writing and your personality.

And most importantly...

• Set goals... and it's corollary, keep them. Say you're going to blog twice a week. Write it down. Add it to your other professional objectives. Tell someone about it so you feel accountable. It helps, I promise.

Ok- that's my list.My goal is to blog twice a week, starting next week. This is the part about telling people to make yourself accountable. Let's hope I can keep it up.

What are your tips and tricks for staying on the blogging ball?

- by Alena Hitzemann, Associate Web Editor

In Anirban's last post, he commented that "communication is universal and very fast if we use the proper tools." How true. The United Breaks Guitars example clearly shows the power of universal feeling, the way that content can catch fire when it resonates with a wide audience who can relate, understand and empathize.

Another viral video is now demonstrating the same point in a different way. The JK Wedding Entrance video has nothing to do with flying or guitars or bad customer service, but it too has struck a cord with the online population, becoming an overnight hit and landing its stars on the Today Show. Not bad for a home video originally intended for family and friends.

If you haven't seen it yet, check it out- it will bring a huge smile to your face.

This video has received almost 13 million hits on YouTube in a little over a week. This is the kind of viral exposure most social media marketers only dream of. Talk about creating awareness and positive brand equity; J(ill) and K(evin) are suddenly household names and faces that everyone loves. And it isn't just the fluffy stuff. The folks at Google, Amazon and Apple have figured out how to benefit financially from the video's success, making it a case study for YouTube's monetization model. There's even a spoof that's making the rounds (really funny, btw.) This is the whole package of social media success.

So, how do we apply the success of this video to our own social media endeavors? What can we learn from JK and their entourage?

1. Make people smile. Obvious but true. The wedding video takes this to an extreme with its outpouring of joy, but I'd venture to say that people like to smile when they're going about their work day as well. Maybe it means writing a humorous blog post, adding a slide with a funny image or comic to your Powerpoint presentation, or passing along a joke on Twitter. Smiling is good and makes people like you.

2. Be creative. One of the reasons that the video is so successful is that it's unexpected. Instead of a somber old wedding procession, we get wacky dancing. Mixing up traditional norms is rarely a bad thing; even when it doesn't work as expected, it shows that you're willing to branch out and take a risk.

3. Break the stereotype. Brides are expected to be prim and proper. IT employees are seen as techy and boring. Jill shattered any preconceptions by escorting herself down the aisle, pumping her fist and joyfully launching into marriage. Do the same by expanding beyond the restrictions of your role and make your online conversations show who you are as a person.

4. Be relatable. Everyone has been to a wedding. Everyone knows what it feels like to truly have fun with friends. The video touches on events and feelings that everyone can understand, which makes its target audience almost limitless. Creating content and communications that also relate to a wide variety of people will significantly increase the potential to go viral.

5. Practice. While Jill and Kevin claim that their group only had one actual rehearsal, I'm willing to bet that those bridesmaids were practicing their moves in their living rooms long before the big day. Practice really does make perfect, or at least makes you look like you know what you're doing and you're good at doing it. Getting the hang of Twitter, using Facebook for business, blogging, commenting, joining discussions... all of these activities take time, patience and diligence to really understand and do well.

Why do you think the JK Wedding Entrance video took off? What other lessons can we take from its success in the business world?

- by Alena Hitzemann, Associate Web Editor

I am in the process of buying my first home. Exciting, right? Also nerve-wracking and scary and confusing and exhausting, but mostly really exciting. Talk about learning curve- the last couple months have been similar to my first months at BMC. It's a whole new vocabulary, complete with acronyms, jargon and legalese... plus, they make you do math! Truly shocking, although I do now feel a sense of pride when I casually throw around terms like "loan origination fee" and debate the relative merits of fir v. oak for hardwood floors. I am also full of real estate cliches and catch phrases passed down from our agent. The most important of which, of course, is:

Location, Location, Location.

So that is the context for my brain right now. Everything, including work, is somehow filtered through a real estate lens. Which is why, I think, I had a very interesting thought the other day when perusing some best practices for blogging. Across several articles, the most consistent and emphasized advice was:

Link, Link, Link.

A light switched on. The L word repetition. The insistence of importance. My mind conjured old SAT analogies:

location : real estate :: linking : blogging. But how exactly did these ideas connect?

And then it struck me: community.

Location is the holy grail of real estate because of community. I suppose it also encompasses the size of the lot and the pretty trees out front and the proximity to a park, but really, it's about the people and the way they interact with each other in that space. It's about friendly neighbors, a welcoming vibe and a comfortable environment- who cares if there is a park a block away if no one goes to the park, or even worse, the people in the park make you feel unsafe? "Location, Location, Location" holds true because our feelings about community don't change. We want to feel welcome, we want to feel comfortable, we want to feel like a part of our tribe.

I think linking brings the exact same thing to blogging. It demonstrates community.

Linking shows that you're a willing participant in something bigger. That you're paying attention to what people in your community are saying and that you respect them; you want to promote their ideas, engage with their opinions and encourage others to do the same on your turf. It's chatting over the fence, giving your neighbor a good recipe or even sharing some gossip (community, of course, isn't all sunshine and kittens.) A blog without links is the guy across the street who never waves when he walks to his car and doesn't pick up after his dog. Links are the social currency of the online world, the recipes, the gardening tips, even the slander. They engender the exact feelings of the perfect location: A link-friendly blog, like the home in a good location, is part of a community.

What do you think? Are links always the blogger's tools to build and grow, or can they backfire?

(And believe me, I know that there aren't any links in this post. I think it's my first one without them. Embrace the irony and wait for Friday's Round-Up.)

- by Alena Hitzemann, Associate Web Editor

Two weeks ago, a fifteen year old Londoner named Matthew Robson began a fortnight-long work experience program at Morgan Stanley. He was placed in the media and internet research team, given a list of tasks, and told to go get 'em. One of those tasks was to compile a report on how teenagers, his peers, consume media. He wrote it in a day. Less than a week later, the press, the twitterverse and the blogosphere are all abuzz with the implications of the "revelations" contained in Matthew's report, How Teenagers Consumer Media.

The UK Guardian trumpets the "flurry of interest from media executives and investors" caused by the report.

The Times calls Robson "the talk of Tokyo, Wall Street and the City," and claims that "Fund managers, CEOs  and analysts are poring over his report."

According to CNBC, the report's "striking claims" are "making waves among media executives and investors."

Bloomberg.com quotes "the analysts" as claiming the report contained the “clearest and most thought-provoking insights we have seen.”

I find this all slightly ridiculous. I tend to agree with Time's Dan Fletcher, who summed up his opinion of the hubbub over the report in one word: toss.

Maybe that's a bit harsh. I don't literally think that the report is garbage. I think Mr. Robson (do you call a 15 yr old "Mr."?) deserves serious props for getting a good internship and taking advantage of it. He clearly did his job well, contacted a wealth of primary sources and put together a not-too-terribly written report (although, as an English major, I have a hard time with all of the members of the press out there- writers, no less!- who seem to be implying that it's equivalent to a professionally created document. I mean, come on. He used the word "release" instead of "realize" in one of the most frequently quoted passages. Let's not make this out to be more than it is. *takes off Grammar Police hat.* )

His content is mildly interesting. Turns out that teenagers have short attention spans, enjoy video games, won't pay for music, love their cell phones, and - this is the biggie, apparently - couldn't care less about Twitter. It's a good snapshot into the youth psyche. But here is my big question: why is this news? Isn't this all completely, blatantly obvious? Don't any of these investors, analysts, fund managers, CEOs and the rest HAVE teenagers? Haven't they noticed all the advertising directed at teens that is predicated on this very information?

And more importantly, why do they care? Is Morgan Stanley selling financial packages to sophomores in high school? If teens aren't your target audience, as is the case with many of the marketers so hungrily devouring this report, then who cares that they prefer Limewire to iTunes and think tweeting is for old farts?

The answer is, they think the teens are trendsetters. They seem to believe that (a) what this demographic is doing now, they will also be doing in ten years when they are old enough to spend serious bucks, and/or, (b) what is cool to teenagers will soon become cool to adults, changing the adult consciousness towards media consumption.

And that's where I disagree. That's where this whole hoopla gets really silly to me.

For instance, let's look at Gen Y ten years ago, when we were Matthew's age. I think I was pretty typical of my generation. I hung out on my parents' computer, the family computer, because my friends and I didn't have our own laptops. Internet was painfully slow. It was the heyday of Napster, and like today's teens, we did not pay for music... of course, it took somewhere around 10 minutes to download one song, so our pirating was probably quite a bit slower than our modern counterparts. I was given a Zack Morris-style cell phone for my 15th birthday, and I think it had somewhere around 200 minutes/month on it. I used it exclusively to make calls, and not very long ones- more along the lines of "Mom, I'm sleeping over at Lucy's, see you tomorrow, bye," than protracted conversations. There was no Facebook, there was no Twitter. We did instant message; first it was ICQ, then AIM. That too was slow. All in all, technology played a role in my life, but not a particularly huge or important one.

Clearly times have changed. But I changed with them. So did the rest of Gen Y. As we grew up, our actions evolved along with technology, trends and personal maturity. I no longer use AIM because I now chat on Facebook. I no longer download music illegally because I'm conscious of the implications to the industry and the artist. My cell phone- probably a quarter of the size of that first one- is now my primary means of communication and I couldn't use up my minutes if I tried. This picture looks nothing like it did when I was fifteen.

Furthermore, I really don't think that teenage trends will significantly affect adult actions. Fifteen year olds are coming from an entirely different place. Things become cool for different reasons: because they're free, and when you're in high school, you have no money; because you have an abundance of free time in which to play video games; because it's easy to circumvent and avoid adults. These reasons don't translate to adult coolness, at least in my book.The fact that teens aren't on Twitter has nothing to do with my efforts to use that particular tool to gather and disseminate knowledge or to promote my work and my company.

The information that Matthew Robson presented is certainly relevant to anyone marketing to teens. But I really think the buck stops there. Who knows where they'll be by the time they're buying into hedge funds and enterprise software- somehow, I don't think it will involve Twitter.

- by Alena Hitzemann, Associate Web Editor

This morning, I decided that it was finally time to register this blog on the various blog directories floating around the internet. I started with Technorati, one of the most popular. Turns out that you have to post this crazy code to your blog in order for them to verify it. So here you go, Technorati...

I promise this is really me:

sy7ai85n93

(Shouldn't there be an easier, sleeker way to do this? I'm trying to build readership, not turn it away with posts dedicated solely to a meaningless strip of characters. Oh well...)

What other directories should I look into? Do these type of directories even matter? Fellow bloggers, where (if anywhere?) have you had success promoting your posts?

- by Alena Hitzemann, Associate Web Editor

I have a confession to make: I'm not a huge Michael Jackson fan.

Blasphemous, I know. But somehow I kind of missed it... too young, maybe? Thriller did come out the year that I was born. But that doesn't seem to have made a difference to most of my peers, who know all the words to every song and still adore him unconditionally in spite of his later, ahem, quirks. Me, I could probably hum the choruses to 3, maybe 4 songs (you don't want to hear me sing.) That's about it. I don't dislike the music, nor am I particularly judgmental of the man... I guess I've always just been somewhat indifferent.

Which is why my reaction to the news of his death yesterday really surprised me.

I was innocently browsing CNN.com and came across the initial report that he had been hospitalized for cardiac arrest. It didn't provide much info, so I did a quick Twitter search- and woah. According to the Twitterverse, the man was dead. And it wasn't just one or two or a hundred suspicious-sounding reports, hundreds of thousands of people were talking about it and tweeting the same news. By the time I scanned to the bottom of the search page- maybe 30 seconds?-  the little yellow bar at the top of the page told me that there were 154,386 results since I started searching. Woah again. Suddenly, for some reason, I really really cared about Michael Jackson.

So I was completely taken aback and quickly came to the conclusion that the news was true. I felt sad and shocked and somewhat out-of-body... that weird sensation when you know that people will talk about this incident on this day for years to come, and I'll find myself saying, "yeah, you know, I was just working at home, browsing around, and saw the news online..." I don't think it's an exaggeration to compare yesterday's events to the day that Elvis died, especially for my generation. If we're defining Gen Y as the folks born between 1974 and 1983, then our formative years were the '80s- MJ's heyday. For Gen Y, he was THE entertainment icon.

But let me repeat: I am a Gen Y anomaly. I'm just not that into the King of Pop. So what was my deal? Why was I suddenly glued to my Twitter feed?

I believe it was the buzz. Call it what you will: UGC, mass reporting, power of the people- whatever. What completely engaged me about yesterday's events was the feeling of real-time communication, of worldwide community, of breaking news and breaking free from traditional news outlets. It was electric. It was something that I wanted to be a part of. I even felt a guilty twinge of pride when I was the first person to break the news on my facebook feed. It was this feeling of coming together with people from all over the world, sharing emotions and information as we watched things develop. It was fascinating and incredible and somehow made the loss seem less sad, because we were all going through it together. It was a real example of how the Net Generation finds, consumes and reacts to current events.

That's social media. That's the soul of online communities.

Don't get me wrong: the tragic human implications of his death, his family and children, completely outweigh any sort of detached analysis on the state of emerging media. My heart is with them. But as Gen Y lost a part of our cultural history, we simultaneously embraced the new roads on our cultural map. I think it's been some pretty amazing synergy.

In the spirit of remembering the music, check out this video. RIP MJ.

- by Alena Hitzemann, Associate Web Editor

(Sorry, Blake, I stole your line.)

Last week, the BMC Communities hit a membership milestone: 20,000 registered users. Yay!

It's kind of remarkable, if you think about it. 20,000 people have chosen to join and participate in a vendor-based community. That's roughly five times the population of the town where I grew up, and they're all here to discuss IT, business, technology and BMC. The Communities have become a place to ask questions, find answers, talk shop, poke around, learn more, meet people, and maybe even waste a little time. The site has actually lived up to its name: it is a group of people who support and help each other. Like a physical community, it is also constantly evolving, and we hope that it continues to evolve in an innovative, interesting and helpful way.

But all of that begs the question: who cares? What is the value of this new number? What does "20,000 registered users" Really Mean?

Of course, as a marketing person, I'm not supposed to ask questions like that. 20,000 users Really Means that we have a nice, round, impressive number to put in our powerpoints and impress our superiors. "Have you heard about our Communities Success? Twenty Thousand People!" Its propensity for propaganda may translate to more press, more visits, more page views, more buzz, more funding. All of those things are theoretically good. But with social media (and as I am learning, metrics in general,) the numbers only tell a very small part of the story.

Let's say, for example, that only 5% of that 20,000 engages with the site on a regular basis. There aren't many of them, but they're super active. Is that good? Is that bad? Why is it happening, and where is that other 95% hanging out? Or, what if 80% of registered users visit the site often, but just lurk. No interaction, no engagement... but hey, 17,000 people are still hanging out in our sandbox! In both cases we have 20,000 users, but vastly different use cases. Which one is "better"? Which tells the more complete story?

The answer, IMHO, is pretty clear in its murkiness: neither is better. Neither is necessarily more complete. Numbers only offer a particular snapshot into behavior and sentiment, and even when matched with other numbers, will only tell the story in one of many possible ways. Ever seen how Fox News and CNN present the very same information? Mmhmm... then you know what I mean.

So, all that being said... metrics and numbers are still obviously important and meaningful and necessary. I'm just starting to really grasp the complexities of web metrics, and I will tell you that they are also fascinating. I just hope that as I learn more, I retain my ability to see through the trees of data into the forest of context, and that my understanding of those trees will make my view of the forest all the more clear.

And for now? Time to break out the bubbly. Come on... 20,000 users! Woo hoo!