BlawgThink: Building Your Reputation

Well, perhaps my reputation precedes me… and that may or may not be a good thing! But I have met several people who have noted, “Oh, you’re Dave!”

This session was given by Matt Homann and was about building your reputation on-line with your blog. The most interesting things to come out of this session were that building your blogging reputation happens outside of your blog.

Matt had some really great ideas about how to incorporate good ol’ fashioned networking into blog reputation building: call up people who’s blogs you like and introduce yourself. Take the conversation analog, because this is about connections with people. One of my favorite suggestions (which he gave credit to someone else for, but I missed her name) is the “unreasonable demand”.

This is a great, great concept! Each week, come up with five unreasonable demands: things that it would be great if they happened, but that you have no expectations for actually happening. Then ask. Let the person know that you are making an unreasonable demand and that you don’t expect it to be filled. You’d be surprised how often people shock you and grant your request anyway!

On the technical, blogging side, Matt mentioned tagging blog entries. This is something I have not done yet, but I definitely intend to start. I’m a nut for Flickr and del.icio.us, so it seems a really natural extension of the blog.