By Lisa Barone

Happy 2010, folks! With so many social media studies showing that companies are looking to up their involvement in social activities this year, I thought I’d help cure that age-old “what should I blog about today?” question. Or at least give you a healthy head start for the year by providing 100+ potential blog topics for your small business blog.  Consider it my contribution to your yearly editorial calendar. I know you’re creating one, right?

So, here are some potential topics. Grab a pen and jot down your favorites. [Or maybe just hit Print.]

Focus on your Industry

1. Write 10 ways your industry will change this year
2. Break down the new laws that will affect your niche in 2010
3. Create a list of the best industry resources
4. Talk about why things are better today (or not) than they were 10 years ago
5. Attend industry events and blog about them
6. Your best marketing tips
7. How your industry is like Your Favorite TV Show [I suggest using Glee. Because that's my favorite show.]
8. The ugly truth about your industry
9. The 8 people in your industry you want to meet
10. What someone needs to consider before getting involved in your industry
11. Comment on an industry-related conversation going on in LinkedIn or Google Groups
12. Talk about the “thing” that would rock your industry if invented or put together
13. Create a chart that breaks down a complicated industry issue or problem
14. Interview someone well-known in your world and profile them
15. Rewrite an old post with fresh eyes and new ideas
16. Publish a presentation you gave somewhere else (with permission)
17. Have a chat with a competitor and blog about it (again, with permission)
18. Search Google News for relevant press releases and news about your industry. Write your own take.
19. Debunk a long-standing myth
20. Host a seminar or meetup and blog about
21. Create a list of the 10 books that someone in your industry should read.
22. Post about what you’d like to see fixed in your industry
23. Conferences people in your industry should attend/speak at
24. Your favorite untapped traffic sources in your industry
25. Issues in your space that deserve more attention

Go Social

1. How you’re using Twitter to increase earnings
2. Post a video that has nothing to do with your industry but that you think people would enjoy.
3. Post a picture. [Browse StumleUpon for inspiration]
4. Participate in a blog meme like last month’s Best of 09
5. Share the best social media campaigns you’ve seen, big and small
6. Hold a contest and pit people against each other
7. Create a poll. Blog the result.
8. Invite a guest blogger to post on your blog
9. How social media increased your ROI this year
10. How social media did nothing but confuse you this year
11. Search Delicious for popular posts on your topics and take a new stance
12. Go to your industry’s Wikipedia page and see what people are talking about in the Discussions area. Comment on it on your blog.
13. Post photos from your company party/team building workshop
14. Find a question on Yahoo Answers or OnStartups and respond on your blog
15. Create a list of the Must Follow Twitter people in your industry

About your Business

1. Why you’re different (and better) than your competition
2. A video tutorial showing how to use your most popular product
3. The problems your sales people hear about most
4. The answer to the most common email you get
5. Share the tools do you use to do your job
6. The secret ways to use your site/product
7. The top 10 WordPress plugins you use on your site
8. How you use your favorite social media site
9. How you built your email list
10. How you’re using Facebook
11. Look at your site logs & answer customer questions
12. How you delegate tasks (or what you mucked up by not delegating)
13. Use Wordtracker’s Keyword Question Tool and answer popular questions
14. Write about why you’re not using social media at all
15. Answer questions left in your comment section
16. Write about the personal branding tactics you use
17. Give 5 reasons to sign up to your email newsletter
18. How you learned to do what you do
19. Create a list of your favorite X
20. What you’re doing to beat the summer slump or winter blues
21. Share a case study
22. Provide an end of the week link roundup
23. Review something
24. Reveal the best niche blogs to guestblog for
25. What keeps you up at night
26. Share a time when you got it wrong in 2010
27. Your strategies for coming up with blog topics.
28. Branding tips that have worked for your business
29. 50 reasons why someone should hire you
30. 5 things people should be focusing on but aren’t
31. What can other industries learn from yours

Highlight Your Customers

1. Put the spotlight on your most active commenters
2. Praise your best customers
3. Post a question and let the community to answer it
4. How customers can woo your customer service department for free stuff
5. Give something away to one of your blog readers.
6. Feature a video detailing a customer’s success with your product
7. Share your biggest screw up with a customer…and how you made it right
8. Publish a customer testimonial
9. Explain the benefits of being a customer
10. Share local organizations you support and ask customers to share their favorites
11. How customers can connect with you on social media
12. Hold an event for Twitter followers to meet and blog it

Get Personal

1. What have you read lately that inspired/angered you?
2. Introduce your staff
3. Share the best decision you made as a SMB
4. Your biggest challenge as a SMB owner
5. What you love best about being a SMB owner. What you don’t like.
6. The danger of doing everything by yourself
7. Write about the achievement you’re most proud of
8. A time when you got it right in 2009
9. Create a video introducing your team to your community
10. Get your rant on
11. How to remain productive working at home
12. Introduce a new employee and what they bring to the table
13. Share the local vendors you trust
14. Give people a video tour of your building
15. Describe your company culture
16. Your new baby (whether that’s a real baby, a pet, a new project for 2010, the car you’ve been restoring for the past two years, etc)
17. Share your company’s history or story
18. Tell a story not about your company
19. Share 10 things you’re thankful for
20. What’s next for your company
21. A list of your most trafficked posts

The point is, there are TONS of things for a small business owner to blog about and share with their audience.  Now that I’ve helped get the ball rolling, get to it.

About the Author

Lisa Barone is Co-Founder and Chief Branding Officer at Outspoken Media, Inc., an Internet marketing company that specializes in providing clients with online reputation management, social media services, and other Internet services. She blogs daily over at the Outspoken Media blog.

Via The NY Times

January 9, 2010

The Children of Cyberspace: Old Fogies by Their 20s

By BRAD STONE

My 2-year-old daughter surprised me recently with two words: “Daddy’s book.” She was holding my Kindle electronic reader.

Here is a child only beginning to talk, revealing that the seeds of the next generation gap have already been planted. She has identified the Kindle as a substitute for words printed on physical pages. I own the device and am still not completely sold on the idea.

My daughter’s worldview and life will be shaped in very deliberate ways by technologies like the Kindle and the new magical high-tech gadgets coming out this year — Google’s Nexus One phone and Apple’s impending tablet among them. She’ll know nothing other than a world with digital books, Skype video chats with faraway relatives, and toddler-friendly video games on the iPhone. She’ll see the world a lot differently from her parents.

But these are also technology tools that children even 10 years older did not grow up with, and I’ve begun to think that my daughter’s generation will also be utterly unlike those that preceded it.

Researchers are exploring this notion too. They theorize that the ever-accelerating pace of technological change may be minting a series of mini-generation gaps, with each group of children uniquely influenced by the tech tools available in their formative stages of development.

“People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project. “College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences.”

One obvious result is that younger generations are going to have some very peculiar and unique expectations about the world. My friend’s 3-year-old, for example, has become so accustomed to her father’s multitouch iPhone screen that she approaches laptops by swiping her fingers across the screen, expecting a reaction.

And after my 4-year-old niece received the very hot Zhou-Zhou pet hamster for Christmas, I pointed out that the toy was essentially a robot, with some basic obstacle avoidance skills. She replied matter-of-factly: “It’s not a robot. It’s a pet.”

These mini-generation gaps are most visible in the communication and entertainment choices made by different age groups. According to a survey last year by Pew, teenagers are more likely to send instant messages than slightly older 20-somethings (68 percent versus 59 percent) and to play online games (78 percent versus 50 percent).

Larry Rosen, a professor of psychology at California State University, Dominguez Hills, and the author of the coming “Rewired: Understanding the iGeneration and the Way They Learn,” has also drawn this distinction between what he calls the Net Generation, born in the 1980s, and the iGeneration, born in the ’90s and this decade.

Now in their 20s, those in the Net Generation, according to Dr. Rosen, spend two hours a day talking on the phone and still use e-mail frequently. The iGeneration — conceivably their younger siblings — spends considerably more time texting than talking on the phone, pays less attention to television than the older group and tends to communicate more over instant-messenger networks.

Dr. Rosen said that the newest generations, unlike their older peers, will expect an instant response from everyone they communicate with, and won’t have the patience for anything less.

“They’ll want their teachers and professors to respond to them immediately, and they will expect instantaneous access to everyone, because after all, that is the experience they have growing up,” he said. “They should be just like their older brothers and sisters, but they are not.”

The boom of kid-focused virtual worlds and online games like Club Penguin and Moshi Monsters especially intrigues Mizuko Ito, a cultural anthropologist and associate researcher at the University of California Humanities Research Institute.

Dr. Ito said that children who play these games would see less of a distinction between their online friends and real friends; virtually socializing might be just as fulfilling as a Friday night party. And they would be more likely to participate actively in their own entertainment, clicking at the keyboard instead of leaning back on the couch.

That could give them the potential to be more creative than older generations — and perhaps make them a more challenging target for corporate marketers. “It’s certainly no longer true that kids are just blindly consuming what commercial culture has to offer,” Dr. Ito said.

Another bubbling intra-generational gap, as any modern parent knows, is that younger children tend to be ever more artful multitaskers. Studies performed by Dr. Rosen at Cal State show that 16- to 18-year-olds perform seven tasks, on average, in their free time — like texting on the phone, sending instant messages and checking Facebook while sitting in front of the television.

People in their early 20s can handle only six, Dr. Rosen found, and those in their 30s perform about five and a half.

That versatility is great when they’re killing time, but will a younger generation be as focused at school and work as their forebears?

“I worry that young people won’t be able to summon the capacity to focus and concentrate when they need to,” said Vicky Rideout, a vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, which will release a sweeping survey on the technology and media habits of children and teenagers this month.

Children my daughter’s age are also more likely to have some relaxed notions about privacy. The idea of a phone or any other device that is persistently aware of its location and screams out its geographic coordinates, even if only to friends, might seem spooky to older age groups.

But the newest batch of Internet users and cellphone owners will find these geo-intelligent tools to be entirely second nature, and may even come to expect all software and hardware to operate in this way.

Here is where corporations can start licking their chops. My daughter and her peers will never be “off the grid.” And they may come to expect that stores will emanate discounts as they walk by them, and that friends can be tracked down anywhere.

“If it’s something you grow up with, you have a completely different comfort with it than someone who has had to unlearn something about the world,” said Mr. Rainie, of the Pew project.

It’s not yet clear whether these disparities between adjacent groups of children and teenagers will simply fade away, as the older groups come to embrace the new technology tools, or whether they will deepen into more serious rifts between various generations.

But the children, teenagers and young adults who are passing through this cauldron of technological change will also have a lot in common. They’ll think nothing of sharing the minutiae of their lives online, staying connected to their friends at all times, buying virtual goods, and owning one über-device that does it all.

They will believe the Kindle is the same as a book. And they will all think their parents are hopelessly out of touch.

Write Like Ernest Hemingway

Throughout his career Hemingway experimented with style and, like any professional writer, constantly learned new techniques. For example, his later writing has a more ornate sentence structure and delves more deeply into character than his early work. Despite these additional discoveries and experiments, however, the core Hemingway style persisted in most of his prose and today it is recognizable worldwide. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954 it was “for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style.”

SENTENCE LENGTH

True, Hemingway wrote short sentences. And true, he is known for simplified, direct prose.10 But what most writers don’t realize is that he worked hard for these effects and that there was a reason for them. Primary among those reasons was the issue of clarity. When he wrote for newspapers, clarity was the objective. Even today newspapers are known for their clear, direct style. Hemingway wrote sentences that were straightforward and clear so that readers could understand the points he made even if they were skimming quickly through his articles.11 You can achieve a similar clarity by writing shorter, more direct sentences. This is especially helpful to keep in mind when rewriting your work. Don’t hesitate to break up long complex thoughts into bite-size morsels for added readability. But clarity was not the only reason for Hemingway’s brevity.
Another reason for short sentences is dramatic effect. In “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) when the protagonist is nearing death because of a gangrenous leg, Hemingway writes: “All right. Now he would not care for death. One thing he had always dreaded was the pain.” Here the short sentences have a cumulative effect, pounding home the idea that the hero is nearing death. Try to achieve a similar effect in your writing by stringing together a series of short sentences when you want to stress a point or add dramatic punch to your prose.

Still another use for short sentences is to add variety and music to your writing. Hemingway often mixes longer and shorter sentences for a euphonious effect. In The Old Man and the Sea (1952), for instance, he tells us the thoughts of the old fisherman: “Then he was sorry for the great fish that had nothing to eat and his determination to kill him never relaxed in his sorrow for him. How many people will he feed? he thought.” The first sentence contains two conflicting thoughts: the old man’s sorrow for the fish and, in contrast with this, his continued determination to kill it. The next sentence suggests the old man’s motivation for fishing, namely to get food. The change in sentence length lends a musical quality to the writing and adds pleasing variety.

SENTENCE SPEED

One of Hemingway’s most recognizable stylistic traits is a fast sentence speed. A writer’s sentence speed refers to how quickly his sentences can be read, either aloud or silently. It’s as if Hemingway’s prose flies along at a rapid clip while the writing of other authors putters slowly in comparison. If you want to write like Hemingway, imitate this signature stylistic move. You’ll be writing in the fast lane.

How does Hemingway manage to speed up his sentences? He uses two methods, the first of which involves choosing shorter words for simpler diction. We’ll deal with that in a moment. The second method is to omit commas.
Joseph Conrad used to retire to a room to write every day and he would have his wife lock him in so that he could concentrate. When he emerged for lunch one afternoon his wife asked what he had done. “I took out a comma,” he said. After lunch she locked him in again and when he emerged for dinner she asked what he had done. He told her, “I put back the comma.”13 If Joseph Conrad struggled for an entire day over the placement of one comma, might it be worth your while to devote a few minutes to this mark of punctuation? Undoubtedly it would be time well spent. Hemingway waged a war against commas, and although he used them in his work he often achieved his greatest technical innovations by omitting them in compound sentences. A compound sentence contains two or more independent clauses. The clauses are usually joined by a comma and a coordinating conjunction, such as and or but. By far the most common coordinating conjunction is the word and.

Consider the sentence: “Often Miss Stein would have no guests, and she was always very friendly, and for a long time she was affectionate.” It is composed of three independent clauses: Often Miss Stein would have no guests. She was always very friendly. For a long time she was affectionate. But the sentence plods along at a slow pace. The three commas slow it down and give it a choppy feel. Here’s how Hemingway actually wrote the sentence in chapter three of A Moveable Feast (1964): “Often Miss Stein would have no guests and she was always very friendly and for a long time she was affectionate.” Punctuated like this it zips along.

Let’s look at another example, from The Sun Also Rises (1926). The narrator is hoping to see the bulls at Pamplona. Joining a crowd of spectators he rushes ahead with them to the bullring. At this point Hemingway speeds up the pace: “I heard the rocket and I knew I could not get into the ring in time to see the bulls come in, so I shoved through the crowd to the fence.” The absence of a comma before the word and increases the tempo, conveying some of the feeling of being in the crowd.
Omitting commas can be a tricky business because such omissions can sometimes make sentences confusing, so this is a technique you don’t want to overuse. But when you come to a section of your story where the action needs to move at a quicker pace, you may wish to try Hemingway’s trick of speeding up the sentences. You’ll leave other writers in the dust.

Learn more about Write Like the Masters

5 Ways To Overcome (Blogging) Shyness And Be More Productive

August 26, 2007

Are you by any chance a shy bloogger? I have a sad news for you: you are going to fail as a blogger if you have not already. Blogging is about socialising, and a self-conscious person lacking good social skills can never be a blogger, let alone a good blogger.

Not sure whether you are a shy blogger or not, and what do I mean by that? Here are some clues: You think a hundred times before writing a sentence, you delete whole paragraphs from your posts just because they make you look bad, you are scared to say something foolish, and.. you are too shy in dealing with your readers. If you are shaking your head in horror, you are, sadly, a shy blogger.

Not to worry though, because shyness can be overcome once you know you are unreasonably shy about things others could care less about.

Shyness is characterized by fear, self-doubt, and lack of confidence. A shy person, in real life, would fear mingling with other people, lock himself in his room, and would try his mightiest to hide his shortcomings from others.

Those are all unreasonable fears, and can be eliminated with little effort on your part.

Here are my thoughts about overcoming shyness in blogging, and in real life in general (therefore not too focused on any one of them)

Kill your blogging persona

If you are shy, you probably have created a persona to represent you on your blog. The first step you are going to take is kill that persona. It’s your blog, and your readers look forward to hearing from you, not your persona. If you think you can hide behind a fake representation of yours, you are mistaken. People who are clever enough to be surfing the web and reading weblogs have powerful BS detectors. They’ll know you are being dishonest to them. You are not a good actor.

Reveal your innermost feelings

Are you afraid of darkness? Tell the world you are, don’t put up false bravado. If it’s any consolation to you, many people are afraid of darkness. When you reveal your innermost feelings and your so-called secrets, you’ll be amazed to know that many of your readers share your thoughts, and have experienced the same kind of emotions as you. You aren’t the only king of the embarrassing moments in the world.

Are you afraid of dogs? *cough*

Turn your shyness into excitement

Shyness usually comes with accelerated activity of adrenaline. Imagine the moment just before going to a party, do you feel a rush of anxious excitement in your spine? If you look at the excitement of going to the party positively, you can start looking forward to meeting all those people you dreaded facing (girls baby!) Make use of that adrenaline while it lasts.

And how does it relate to blogging you ask? Look at it this way: While writing a post, you remember a personal anecdote of falling into a street gutter. Your adrenaline starts flowing because of embarrassment and you are forced to craft a fake version of that anecdote. You tell your readers that your friend fell into the gutter while you watched him. Now, since you are kind of feeling guilty about being dishonest to your readers, you’ll probably leave a clue for your readers that your anecdote is all made up (shy people are not very good at being shy) So, why not relate the anecdote as it really happened and let your adrenaline pump some excitement into it? It’s even more exciting to see people laugh at your ‘cuteness’.

Be outspoken

One way to overcome shyness is to somehow gather the courage to call a spade a spade. If you don’t like religion, say so. Be critical. Don’t be afraid of challenging what you think is wrong. People won’t laugh at you, they won’t sneer at you. And if they do, why’d you care as long as you know you are right? Perhaps it would be a good chance to laugh at those goof balls laughing at you. There is no reason to be shy about expressing your real beliefs and opinions. You have as much right to have your own beliefs as anybody else.

Don’t be too appearance conscious

One problem with shy people is that they care too much about their personality and their appearance. Don’t ever write a post and then look at it from different angles with intention to modify it to make you look as good as possible (according to your own twisted standards) The thing is that there is no set standard of goodness. How people judge you varies from person to person. So, it’s time to start being yourself rather than someone else.

OK, above points are not radically different from one another, but they highlight different aspects of one point: Its no good caring too much about how others might perceive you, and it’s counterproductive to be shy.

AND while we are at it, did I tell you that I don’t have a girlfriend?

Overcoming Shyness

Posted By Editor, Pick The Brain On October 9, 2007 @ 6:00 am

All my life I’ve been an inwardly directed person. While some people like to think out loud, I prefer to process the world internally, answer my own questions, and come to a conclusion before speaking up.

This personality trait has benefits and drawbacks. On the positive side, it’s a source of strength as a writer and analytical thinker. Without it I wouldn’t have taken an interest in books/writing and this site wouldn’t exist. On the downside, my tendency to keep everything inside is responsible for one of my major weaknesses — shyness.

Understanding Shyness

Shyness is rooted in fear — an irrational fear of speaking up and being humiliated or ignored. Why are some people so afraid of speaking out? In my mind the main causes are oversensitivity and insecurity. When you associate speaking out with pain and embarrassment, you’ll do almost anything to avoid it.

Unfortunately, shyness is an enormous detriment to success. For people who share this problem, it’s important to understand the causes and work towards overcoming it.

It’s Not You It’s Them

For naturally quiet people, the fear of speaking can arise from a few bad experiences, especially at an early age. When an adult reacts angrily or dismissively to an attempt at self expression, it’s natural to take it personally and shy away from future expression. Even if this only happens once or twice, people tend to exaggerate these incidents until they become mental monsters. Growing up, it took me a long time to realize how self centered people are. The way someone reacts to something you say usually has nothing to do with you–it’s more likely a reflection of the mood they’re in or a recent event in their life.

A key to overcoming shyness is recognizing these perceived slights for what they are–meaningless. When someone reacts to you negatively, don’t take it personally. Imagine the other person’s perspective. Is there something that may have put them in a bad mood? Are they trying to cover up their own inadequacy? Considering the perspective of the other person makes it easier to put their reaction in the proper context.

It’s also essential to let go of bad experiences. When you dwell on a bad experience, it grows into something much more frightening than reality. Don’t do this to yourself! The more you think about a bad experience the more power you give it. Don’t blame yourself. Think about something constructive. The more you can fill your mind with positive memories of speaking up the easier it gets.

Other People Aren’t So Different

Another important step in overcoming shyness is realizing that other people are basically the same as you. Everyone is insecure and afraid of embarrassment. Other people usually aren’t as smart as you think. If you have a question, chances are someone else is wondering about the same thing.

Don’t let one or two bad experiences dictate your entire opinion of humanity. By and large, people are friendly and interested in connecting with others. They’ll respond favorably to your attempts at communicating. In most cases, people will be thrilled that you took the initiative to break the ice.

Realizing Self Worth

The second cause of shyness is insecurity. If you don’t think you have anything valuable to contribute, what’s the point of risking embarrassment?

To get over this you need to recognize the merit of your own thoughts and the value they present to others. It’s ironic that the people most inclined towards shyness are often the most thoughtful. To reach your potential, you need to share yourself with the world. Your brilliant insights don’t hold any value until they’ve enlightened someone else.

The best way to get accustomed to sharing is practice. Force yourself to speak up, especially when you don’t want to. Sit in the front of the room and make yourself visible. Understand that sharing your insights with people is doing them a favor. Once you get used to opening up, you’ll notice how positively people react. This will build your self confidence ^[1] and faith in the goodwill of others.

The Duty to Contribute

Overcoming shyness isn’t just something you should do for yourself, it’s also part of being a contributing member of society. When you have a thought or idea that deserves to be heard, you’re not only hurting yourself by keeping quiet, you’re hurting the people around you.

A basketball coach once explained to me how passing can selfish. If a player has an open shot that she can make, and she decides to pass instead, that player is being selfish and hurting the team. When you pass up the chance to excel because of shyness or the fear of failure, you’re hurting the group to shelter yourself.

Other people need you. They need your intelligence and insight. They need your help to work through problems. By hiding behind shyness, you limit the help you can give to your friends, family members, and colleagues.

A college professor of mine used to make a big deal about overcoming shyness. He called it a, “silly, foolish habit,” and said, “the sooner you can break it the better.” Shyness doesn’t benefit anyone. Saving yourself a little embarrassment doesn’t amount to much in the long run. By overcoming shyness, you give yourself the chance to be recognized and promoted. You create opportunities and open yourself up to forming meaningful relationships.

Don’t keep your talent inside, share at every opportunity so it can grow and flourish.

See also:

• A Shy Person’s Guide to Talking to Strangers ^[2]
• How to Appear Friendly and Approachable ^[3

[1] build your self confidence: http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/10-ways-to-instantly-build-self-confidence/

[2] A Shy Person’s Guide to Talking to Strangers: http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/the-shy-persons-guide-to-talking-to-strangers/

[3] How to Appear Friendly and Approachable: http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/rock-the-party-how-to-appear-friendly-and-approachable/

[4] mcwong: http://flickr.com/photos/63325133@N00/