Blogger Stories: Marianne Richmond

With a writing sytle that often reminds me of Ellen Goodman, Marianne Richmond is both funny and smart. Her story tells how blogs, even business blogs, are really signposts of our lives...combined with a little Twinkie Defense and some Kool-Aid.

Blogger Story Teller: Marianne Richmond, Resonance Partnership

At a recent St. Louis Bloggers lunch, two of the many topics discussed resonated with me….one was that all blogers have ADD. Now, I don't believe there is any empirical data to support that;  I think we were mostly mixing the Twinkie Defense with our Kool-Aid to explain our frenetic blogger behaviors. The second was the fact that we had the del.ic.ious feeds on our blogs for ourselves mostly; not folksonomy but as content personal content management.

In many respects, we agreed, our blogs, which are business blogs, are still signposts of our lives, albeit through our work, for ourselves….our travels, the conversations that we have, what we are reading, all arranged in chronological order, by categories. In other words, yes, blogging is all about the relationships we build and that is most definitely the spark that lights the fire but, at least for us ADD bloggers, our blogs give us the added benefits of a way to organize our ever increasing accumulation of information and to memorialize the moments of our lives when we are onto the next thing.

One of the other really interesting people that I have met through blogging, Scott Ginsberg, has this very bloggy concept about approachability (and a book called The Power of Approachability, which he says is not a characteristic or a type but a way of life.

He uses a front porch as a metaphor for approachability, or as he puts it, an architectural manifestation of approachability. His specific front porch is his "never without" name tag. One of the key concepts of Scott's approachability concept is to "own a word", for example approachability.

So, what makes Scott initially approachable is his front porch, his name tag. Approachability is the word he owns. It is his identity, or as we brand marketers might say, brand identity…or just brand.

In many respects, our blogs are our front porches; they are what facilitate the initial approachability that begins the relationship. But as stories are told and read on blogs and we approach and engage with each other we are also telling our stories to ourselves; we are conveying our identity to others while documenting and organizing our identity for ourselves. 

For me, blogging has served that dual purpose since we are what we do. Timothy Wagner, author of Strangers to Ourselves, Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious writes that too much introspection can cause confusion and it is better to pay attention to what you actually do and how other people react to you if you want to "know thyself"….so blog it!  And when did that defining moment occur when you realize that you actually think and speak in blog?

Comments

[Natural Green CLeanse]

I am actually happy to read this website posts which carries lots of valuable information, thanks for providing such data.

[website traffic store]

I all the time used to study article in news papers but now as I am a user of web thus from now I am using net for articles, thanks to web.