Jon DiPietro is Domesticating IT

Alec Baldwin's character colorfully presents his selling philosophy, "ABC: Always Be Closing."

Getting started with blogging and social media is intimidating to many.  It took me time to develop the confidence, skills, and habits that make it possible to deliver content on a regular basis. More than anything, it requires a 24/7 mindset that I call “ABC: Always Be Collecting,” which is a take on the fantastic movie Glengarry Glen Ross.

If you’ve never seen the movie, you can get a good sense of the plot from this seven minute clip of Baldwin’s passionate, insulting and obscenity-laced motivational speech.  Warning – there is some strong language in this scene.

“Always Be Collecting” means establishing a commitment and habit to always be thinking about collecting content for your blog, Tweets, and Facebook updates.  This mindset will only have limited effectiveness without a support structure.  I’ve included 4 tips to help you get going.

#1 Intelligence

I am not referring to the ability to comprehend, but rather the collecting of information.  For me, intelligence is the oxygen that fuels my content generation.  These are my intelligence gathering tools:

• Barnes & Noble: I read, read, read, read…
• Google Reader: I subscribe to 210 RSS feeds and have read over 11,000 articles in the last 30 days.  However, keep in mind that “read” is probably an overstatement and it’s more accurate to say that I “scanned” those articles, looking for interesting content and then reading, bookmarking, and sharing as appropriate.
• Twitter: More and more, people are using Twitter as a source of “pre-qualified” information.  Because you are presumably following people you trust and/or in which you’re interested, then it stands to reason that links they share will be of interest to you also.  It’s becoming a real time news echo chamber that helps me stay on top of the latest tech developments and trends.

This is a shot of a hotel room I stayed in for two weeks that is still in the "hopper" waiting for a hotel room rant post that is coming.

#2 Raw Materials

Words are the foundation of all online content, but pictures and video constitute the paint, carpeting, furniture, etc…  Throughout the course of the day, I am mindful to be collecting pictures, screenshots, and video that may eventually be used in a post somewhere.

My BlackBerry Bold smartphone is absolutely indispensable as a raw material collection tool, as it is something I always carry and can take pictures and videos that are of perfectly acceptable quality for online use.

I use TechSmith’s SnagIt as a screen capture tool for grabbing screen shots of programs and web pages that may come in handy later on.  I also use Camtasia Studio for authoring and editing screen casts.

#3 Total Consciousness

Content collection needs to become a habit, which requires you perform the action at least 21 times.  Here are some tips to help ensure you remember:

• Write down the habit you’re trying to establish and post it in as many places as possible.
• Schedule your content collection ahead of time.  Obviously, you can’t really schedule something like this, but if you can put calendar appointments on your phone, then at least you are getting regular reminders that will help keep you in that frame of mind.
• Reward yourself every time you come up with a new blog idea.
• Concentrate on consistency rather than results.  In other words, don’t worry if the content you’re collecting is not of the quality level you’d like it to be.  The most important thing is to keep developing the habit and mindset, which will eventually become a habit that will result in more “aha” moments and better quality stuff.

My blogging tools of the trade

#4 Be Prepared

Assuming you fuel the content machine, collect the raw materials, and develop the proper habits, the last piece of the puzzle is being prepared to trap and keep that content.  I’ve settled on a system that relies on two tools; the voice recorder feature of my phone and a Moleskine notebook.

If you’re as scatter-brained as I am (and even if you’re not), then a voice recorder is a non-negotiable, must have tool.  I finally grew tired of ideas zipping in and out of my head as often as Tiger Woods… well, you get the idea.  I’d been telling myself for quite some time that I need to pick up one of those small voice recorder devices when it occurred to me that my BlackBerry had one built into it.  Now, I’m in the habit of carrying my phone everywhere, including some places that may be construed as a “too much information” moment, because you never can tell when your next blog idea will strike.  I had three in row occur to me when I was shaving the other day, and quickly dictated them to the phone’s voice recorder.

Eventually, the random thoughts and musings get transcribed off of the phone and into my blog notebook.  This notebook contains a diary of ideas for articles that is actually starting to grow quite fat.  I am gradually picking up the pace of my posts as a result of growing confidence that I’m not going to run out of content any time soon.  They key is to build up a healthy backlog of articles that can smooth the peaks and fill in the valleys.

These are just my ideas – let’s hear about your tips and tricks.  I’m not sure I’d recommend Dogbert’s approach:

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What is RSS?

Well, it stands for “Really Simple Syndication” but given the fact that there is still not widespread adoption and so few people understand it, one could take exception to that moniker. In any case, let’s try to use a newspaper analogy to explain this. Think about reading your local newspaper. For many people, there are certain sections that are of more interest than others. And maybe some sections that are of no interest. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could call up the newspaper and tell them, “I’m only interested in the Local, Business, and Sports sections, so would you please only include those in my newspaper? Also, I’d like the newspaper delivered to me at home, the office, and in my car – depending upon where I am at the time.”

So, that’s it in a nutshell; it allows you to subscribe to “feeds” that contain news and information from sources that are of interest. And depending on your technology platforms, you can read them from anywhere, anytime. You can scan over headlines, deciding which (if any) sound interesting, choose whether or not to read the entire article, and even make notes, mark them as a favorite, or share them with your friends and associates.

For this particular article, I’m going to stay away from the more technical how-to stuff and try to concentrate on the “what” and “why”. I’ve spoken with many colleagues in the past couple of weeks who are either new to the concept or don’t really understand how it can be leveraged by them to help them meet their personal and/or professional goals.

Here’s a snapshot of my Google Reader. It’s only showing publications I haven’t yet marked as “read” (click on the image to see full size).

So you can see that I’ve set up my reader to “tag” feeds with certain keywords (e.g. “FFL”, “LinkedIn”, “News”, “Sports”, etc…) I can browse through the publications based on these categories and when something seems worth reading more, I’ll either click on the article to read it immediately or “star” it so that I can read it later. Because I’m using Google Reader, I can also do all of this on my BlackBerry as well using Google’s Mobile Reader Application.

Why Do I Care?

• Let the information come to you. For me personally, this is the most compelling benefit of RSS. I don’t have to worry about missing out on information that might be important to me by failing to read a particular issue of a newspaper or seeing a press release on a company’s web site.

• It takes all kinds. There are many different types of RSS feeds available for subscription that make it possible to stay informed of many different topics. You can subscribe to news articles, blog posts, forum discussions, Craigslist postings, press releases, etc…

• It’s OK to look. Any RSS reader will display a headline and several summary lines describing the publication, allowing you to quickly and easily scan through for items of interest.

• Save, tag, share, and/or comment. RSS readers generally provide capabilities to perform tasks to organize, document, and share your subscriptions. If you see an interesting article but don’t have time you can save it to read for later. You can assign “tags” that categorize articles and even share them with others in your social and/or professional circle.

If you want to start utilizing RSS, the first decision to make is selecting a RSS Reader. Read this Lifehacker article to get some recommendations. You can also see how many different ways there are to make use of your RSS feeds.

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