I’m young, and there’s no remedy for that other than time. There are lots of great things about that–I don’t know that many of them are in the business sphere, though. Experience and authority encourage a lot more client confidence than youthful innovation does. The one thing that I bring the thunder with is all of this business with blogs and social media and conversations taking place far beyond the grasping tentacles of corporate PR departments. It’s knowledge and experience I acquired without any aims toward making myself marketable or valuable.

The stuff is interesting, and when it started, so much of the user community and viral promotion of it was with high school and college students. It’s old-hat by the time it winds its way up and out to where you’re hearing about it widely. Facebook? I had a profile for a few years, got bored of it, and deleted over a year ago. What percentage of its current users think it’s new? And I’m not even an uber geek with this stuff…

RefreshWeb had a blog for a few years before this one, but it was hosted off-site, neglected, totally under-utilized. With the new site, I pushed for a company blog where most of us post. Gradually, we had one up and running–and it got handed to me to manage. I had been thinking, “This is great! We can all write about marketing. It’ll be well-rounded because we’re all good at different stuff!” When the “Okay! Start posting guys!” announcement went out, half the people freaked out a little bit. I wrote a long email explaining why this is a good idea, which prompted a request for me to do a little presentation on blogging. It’s a very strange thing when the youth that usually works against you suddenly becomes the thing that makes you the expert in the room.

Throwing together a little PowerPoint before the meeting, it surprised me how much I knew about this, how much subconscious ruminating had been going on and fitted itself into something cohesive. My instincts tend to tell me I’m a failure if what I do isn’t the absolute biggest and best out there. Since my own personal blog sports 100-200 readers a week (depending on my current hobby’s popularity), rather than the thousands that read the big dogs, I considered it to be something not very successful. Then I realized that those people almost all come directly–not through search–to read me ramble about my life. And they come back over and over, for months and years. It’s humbling.

The crazy thing is, this self-indulgent hobby of mine has turned into an actual skill. I have been blogging since 2000, though the early ones were secretly written under a pen name and totally fictitious. In the three full years (in a month!) that I’ve had my blog at Typepad, I’ve built a sturdy little readership. It’s mostly not my real-life friends, who actually don’t read me, but people I don’t know. And I’m kind of like Seinfeld–about nothing in particular. It awes me a little that I can use these skills to do really positive things for RefreshWeb, and in turn for our clients who want to go in this direction and aren’t sure how to proceed. In many ways, business blogging is far easier than personal blogging.

I’m reworking my PowerPoint and will share it when I’m done.