Last week was MozCon 2013.
My doppelganger, Roger the robot, and me. Photo by the talented Rudy Lopez.
Moz hosts this huge convention every year – to promote their business, obviously, but also for marketers to network and learn the latest in web marketing. This year they were kind enough to let me attend 🙂
I’m pretty new to web marketing, so I found this particularly fascinating. And on a personal level, I loved hearing about social media and how businesses are taking advantage of those marketing opportunities and the social networks are changing in response.
(I want to talk about three semi-related things that all go together in my head, so I’m just going to spew. I have a point, I promise – I’ll get there eventually.)
The other exciting thing that happened last week: I finally finished the arduous task of updating the pictures and links in every single post that transferred over here from my old blog. At some point, I looked at a calendar and realized that my obliteration of that blog coincided with its anniversary – it was two years ago this past Sunday that I wrote my first post there.
So that was a little bittersweet.
I’m still happy with my decision, and happier still with this new site and the direction my posts have taken.
Actually, one of my favorite things about my new site is that it’s clearly my personal website, and very much intend for my readership to be people who know me in real life. That seems to be exactly what’s happened: if you are reading this, you very likely subscribe to my posts by email, or you clicked over from Twitter. Most of my email subscribers are my family members; most of my Twitter followers are my friends or readers of my old blog So that’s a success.
(Comparatively, most of the people who landed on my old blog found it via google search, and for most of those searchers, a food blog was probably not what they were looking for. Word to the wise: if you put the words “free” and “girlfriend” next to each other in the title of your website, you will have some very interesting search traffic.)
Sometime after I’d started my old blog, I decided to set up an account to promote myself and connect with other bloggers. It was fun for a while, but I quickly tired of it. Since I slowed down on blogging last year, I changed the way I used Twitter and it became so much more fun: I follow comedians who I like. Sure, I still get lots of promoted tweets and other garbage, but I see lots of really funny one liners and funny pictures.
Recently, I was talking with another blogger about Pinterest, and I said that while I’m using it to pin a few wedding things here and there, I don’t really “get” Pinterest, and I probably won’t continue to use it after the wedding’s over. She asked me who I’m following on Pinterest. I told her mostly my Facebook friends.
“Well that’s the problem,” she said very plainly. “You’re not using it right.”
Here’s the thing: Facebook is not Twitter is not Pinterest is not LinkedIn … on and on ad nauseum. If I use Facebook to connect with people who I went to high school or college with (people I went to school with but haven’t talked to in years make up the majority of my Facebook network), then of course I don’t really care what they’re pinning on an unrelated social network.
A number of the MozCon speakers said something along these lines. If you are using every social network the same way, and connecting with all the same people, you are missing the point.
