Grace K Boyle Visits #MKT250
November 14, 2009
Today in my favorite class (brownie points welcome) Internet Marketing with Elaine Young, we had a special guest speaker all the way from Colorado, Grace K Boyle. Grace is a Champlain College Alumni who now works at Lijit as a marketing/business development/PR mastermind. You can find Grace in nearly every corner of the web, like twitter, tumblr, as well as her own personal blog Small Hands, Big Ideas. She’s absolutely everywhere!
So I was kind of excited when I heard she was coming, knowing only a small amount about her. But I got really excited to hear her speak when I found out she was going to talk about blogging. Perfect timing, since I finally picked a platform for It’s Jake Not John, and I had finally begun start putting up some real content. So Grace had a lot of really nice words of wisdom that I thought I would pass on to you.
In regards to company blogs she told us
1) Don’t make it all about press.
2) Guest blog posts are great.
3) There’s always something interesting people in your company have to say.
4) Blogs give a company great personality.
And on personal blogs,
1) Stick with it, it takes time to figure out blogging, it took me 2-3 months to get the hang of it
2) Enable comments, and if someone does comment, respond back, send them an e-mail.
3) Carve out a blog schedule, calendars help.
After dispersing her words of wisdom, we entered a short Q&A which really got me thinking about the blogosphere.
Q: Do you think Twitter will take over blogging?
A: “No, Twitter is great for saying a lot of powerful things, but nothing is comparable to the content you can have on a blog. They have great synergy, I’d be surprised if someone had a blog without Twitter.”
Q: What did you blog about when you where a student?
A: “I started blogging about what I did everyday. But through Twitter people started asking me what I thought about. So I began writing about what I thought. It’s very open ended, the best thing to do is just start blogging.”
As a final comment Grace left us with this… “I didn’t expect to connect with so many people through blogging. Future employers, clients, and friends.”
It was a lot of information for me to process, but I loved every minute of it. Every thing she said today will undoubtedly help me out in the future with It’s Jake, Not John.
November 17, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Jake, this is an awesome overview. I forgot I even said some of these things
I’m stoked that you’re blogging and take it from me (post college and now working) it’s going to be really positive not only for your career but also opening up avenues to meet new people. Like I said, people worry about what they have to say, but truth is, you’re going to have to get wet if you’re going to cross the river. Speak about topics in marketing class, industry news, a conversation you heard while walking through the quad., etc. It’s your blog, so there isn’t a wrong way to do it.
Let me know if you have any blogging questions, I would be happy to help!
Cheers and good luck with the rest of the year.