I’m new to the startup scene here in town and I’m still getting a feel for the ecosystem around here. I’m doing a lot of listening, just reading blog posts comparing us to the Valley, about our lack of swagger or lack of innovation or this or that. I’m trying to get a sense of the environment out here and learn.
My take so far? I gotta tell ya, it’s not perfect here, but seriously, Boston is awesome and I don’t think we give ourselves enough credit.
Trust me: In June 2009 I wouldn’t have moved away from my parents - not to mention WEGMANS – to live in some overpriced shithole apartment if I didn’t love that city outside my door. (Seriously. I pay like $600 a month in rent and my shower head is held up by a hair elastic. Go figure.)
I’m going to quote Bostinnovation’s take on all the Valley vs. Boston comparisons:
“The environment we currently work in is home to a world class collegiate population, large amounts of VC and plenty of technical talent. Surely, world-changing companies have been brought to life in less favorable conditions than our own.”
Seriously, people. Boston isn’t so bad!
I’m going to talk to you about Techrigy/Alterian. They created a social media monitoring software, SM2, out of Aaron Newman’s basement in Rochester, NY in 2006.
There are definitely innovators in Rochester, NY – but Twitter and tech and such isn’t as ubiquitous as around here. In Boston, my boss’ three-year-old daughter knows how to use an iPad. Every major company and even local businesses know their way around social media around here. It’s not like that in Rochester. Many people are still figuring it out. Not the best situation for trying to sell a social media monitoring platform, right?
The people at Techrigy didn’t waste time comparing their environment to others. They sat in the basement, and then sat in an office with no windows, and worked their butts off. And then they got acquired.
So, I’m not saying that they are Google – but they are still a startup success story and awesome.
Beantown’s doing alright! We have the tech scene and the educational institutions at our hands. There’s a lot of young energy and leadership in the community, making it a place that new people like me want to be a part of. (Follow @GreenhornBoston, @BosWomenpreneurs@DartBoston and @Bostinnovation for a start.) I would just say that yes, it’s good to stop and question these things and look at what the Valley is doing – but let’s not get too distracted by it. We’ve all got work to do. After all, if we want to “catch up” to the Valley in any way – at some point you just gotta get back to your basement and execute.
This video is getting a lot of buzz and I think it’s certainly worth a look. It’s basically a cool take on how so much of our lives are lived on Facebook – and that’s just for your average Joe, not even a social media chick like myself that does this social media stuff for a living.
People blog and talk a lot about professional and personal balance in social media, and in conferences they stand up and say to “just get over it.” They’re right, at some point we have to just get over it. Google knows no difference. Your personal and professional accounts, opinions and profiles are this big hot mess of an online presence. If you aren’t comfortable with mixing that, you probably aren’t in the right business.
That said, I just want to put it out there that it’s still hard.
It’s hard because people my age haven’t only used social media for business use. We joined Facebook before we left for college, to meet our roommates and classmates online before we moved in freshman year. We joined before “grown ups” were on there, before there were fan pages to manage and before FBML was invented. We put dumb stuff up there sometimes because we didn’t know better. Facebook was an epicenter and broadcast portal for drama. And for some, with jobs that don’t matter so much what your “personal brand” and “online presence” is – it still is.
Now I’m using Facebook as a marketing tool, and it’s a weird conflict. I login to update my business’ fan page or create an event for a Tweetup or network with other community managers in the community managers group, and “on my way to work,” I’m bombarded by a parade of other people’s life choices, aka the news feed, leaving me feeling distracted and confused. All I wanted to do was plan a damn Tweetup and move on to the next task for the day. Now I’m questioning my path to personal success!
I don’t think that having separate personal and professional Facebook is the answer. Having two separate accounts would almost further distance the professional/personal sides and intensify the identity crisis, I think. Plus, in my case, it’s probably too late for that. It probably comes down to having more self-assurance and comparing myself less to people I don’t know anymore, filtering them out of my news feed even.
Anyone else struggle with this, even if we’re not supposed to admit that we struggle with this?
I’m feeling nostalgic these days. With my second Inbound Marketing Summit wrapped up, and experiencing my first time at Blog World in Vegas in October, I’m entering November and that means it’s my Twitterversary again. Two years. Damn.
And it’s yet another blog for me. You may notice that janetaronica.com now has a new home on WordPress.org, a new (and anticipated to be evolving) look, and compiled content from three of my blogging ventures over the past two years. Yes, three… Things don’t look perfect on this blog right now and that’s ok. Startup life has taught me that sometimes “done” is better than perfect, and you iterate your product from there. I’m happy to have my domain name and my content here, my Tweet button and Facebook like button installed so you can share it with your friends. There’s a way to subscribe to my content. I’ll add the extra stuff as I go along, but I’m no longer waiting around for myself to figure that stuff out before I blog. It’s a blog. Blogging comes first.
I haven’t done things perfectly in social media. Here’s what I’d do if I started today:
I’d start a blog on WordPress.com. I’d buy my domain name from the beginning and buy whatever amount of money they charge these days for domain re-direction. I’d use the *simplest* theme possible. I would not. I REPEAT: I would not fuss and muss over the look and feel of my blog. I would just start blogging.
A mistake I made in blogging is wasting a lot of time on the look/feel of my blogs and getting frustrated with coding stuff I didn’t understand. I wasted time I could’ve spent writing screwing around with HTML and whatchamacallit and getting no where with it. I’d get the content right before I worried about headers, colors, widgets etc.
Social Health Nut is an example of this. I fussed around so much trying to figure out how I wanted that thing to look that by the time it looked the way I wanted it to, I realized I didn’t even know what I wanted to blog about. So I didn’t blog. #fail
You have to scale. What is priority when it comes to customizing your blog? What matters most? When you are JUST starting, this matters most:
RSS button (so people can subscribe to your content)
After I got a good six months of blog-at-least-once-a-week content under my belt, THEN I would move my content over to WordPress.org. There are far more theme options and customizations available with plugins from what I can see so far. Paying for Bluehost and having their customer service people there to bail me out when I jack up my .php stuff is well worth it. You can’t get any help like that when paying WordPress.com for rights to customize the CSS over there.
Another option? Just do a Posterous blog. It’s a very simple blogging platform, you can just email your posts to [email protected] and they show up on your site. It’s a change to focus on the content without the distractions of all that other garbage.
Also, remember: You don’t have to do a WordPress blog.
You get my point. Just start blogging. Not sure what to write about? Talk about how you’re not sure what to write about because you’re just learning about social media. “I’m new to social media and I read this article today and this is what I thought of it.” That’s a legitimate blog post! And my God, this SMD community would find that sort of stuff refreshing coming from someone new to the space, I think. Just start blogging. Go. Go, go go.
And just start Tweeting. That’s what I did two years ago and I’d do it all again. I literally just started asking people how they got their PR jobs in Boston and Tweeted blog posts I read and commented on and found interesting. I still do that, only now I’m asking about advice when it comes to community management and Tweeting/commenting on blog posts related to that. Remember that “don’t talk to strangers” advice you got as a kid? That doesn’t apply to Twitter. Talk to strangers. Lots of them.
Getting on Twitter and blogging changed my life. It changed my career direction and introduced me to amazing friends, mentors and people. It’s been a wild two years. There are things I could have done better, yes. But there is nothing that I would do differently.
