The Peg Is In

Everyone pulls a boner on their blog sometime (figuratively speaking, of course). A joke misfires, or a reference is misunderstood. It’s okay, step back off the ledge…this is not the end of your blogging career. Here are some tips about how to regain your credibility as a blogger after a disastrous post.

Some of these come from having done stupid things on my own blog, some I’ve only experienced as an appalled blog reader. All of them seem like no-brainers, but they’re so common, there must be a pile of missing blogger brains somewhere…maybe on the side of a road in South Dakota.

This is not meant to shame anyone in particular, but to offer constructive tips your friends might be too embarrassed to pass on. Search your heart, and your posts, to see if you need to change your ways.

Comedy-check your jokes before publishing.
When you make a joke or pull a prank online, you can’t see your readers’ faces, so you don’t know how many people groaned. If you’re not Aziz Ansari or The Bloggess, you may need a comedy reality check. Before you blog your next joke, run it past someone who you know is funny (for me, that’s @zrdavis—that guy is hilarious). If they don’t laugh, dump it…and consider taking a comedy class, which can sharpen your joke-telling skills, as well as deal you a humbling lesson in direct feedback.

Don’t assume meme + you = funny.
If a meme goes viral, that means its creator was funny. It doesn’t mean the meme itself confers magical comedic powers, no matter how badly you want the attention. The more you exploit popular memes (and the more you ignore that your instance fell flat), the more desperate you look.

In particular, please stop making “Shit _____s Say” videos. It was funny once, maybe twice, but there are now 6 million versions of it. And as my friend @SdGeek put it, “Even Shatner couldn’t pull that off, and he’s Shatner, for God’s sake.” You can hitch a ride on the Meme Express, but lemmings rarely make for good comedians.

Check your spelling.
I can’t understand why anyone would skip spell-check…especially people who write for a living, or expect their blog to represent them professionally. However you do it, check for misspellings every time or look like a lazy idiot.

I recently saw a self-professed “nerd” misspell “San Francisco.” This hasn’t been an honest mistake since the typewriter era.

Don’t use multiple exclamation points.
You can stop bragging that you graduated from a prestigious university if you punctuate like you did in junior high. Using this –> !!! is never okay, unless you’re referring to the band (yes, there’s actually a band by this name). More exclamation points do not convey more urgency. They say that your blog post is as frivolous as a passed note in class.

Even single exclamation points can be overused. If more than half your sentences end in exclamation points, you are conveying not excitement, but hysteria. It’s like ringing alarms when there’s no fire—annoying.

Don’t confuse “being positive” with “everything I do is important, monumental and fantastic.”
The only person who will agree with you is your mother, but remember, her love for you is unconditional. Internet strangers aren’t so kind. Try writing a post that never uses the word “I” and has no pictures of you in it. If that’s difficult, we may have found your problem.

Never, ever lie about your professional life.
Reader trust is almost impossible to get back once it’s lost. Whether you’re just trying to make a joke (“I’ve accepted a fabulous job with a major brand – just kidding!”), gloss over the fact you got laid off (“Sure, I still work at that big company”), or pump up your resume by being vague about how many national brands you’ve worked with (you say many but it’s really just one), don’t lie. Your credibility is at stake, and if you show you can’t be trusted to own it and be truthful, many will not believe anything else you have to say.

Don’t go long stretches without blogging.
Okay, I’m guilty of this one; as you can see on this very blog, I go months without posting. But in my case I was writing and editing a city-based collaborative blog, then a 150-person consumer advice blog for Lending Tree, then a corporate blog for DivX. So really, I was blogging quite a bit…just not here.

Some people just have one blog to worry about, yet still only post about once every 3 months. These same people think this will get them a job in social media. By comparison, bloggers on tech blogs like Mashable and VentureBeat post 2 to 5 times every weekday. Who would you rather resemble? Pick your post frequency and stick to it.

Apply these tips to your blogging, and you will gain credibility, add fans, and stop torturing your friends. You will also become leaner, more sexually attractive, and finish sudokus faster. (That last claim is a joke. Don’t worry, Zach Davis says it’s funny.)

5 years of movie tickets, courtesy Flickr user fligtar (CC 2.0)

Current state: 32 movies seen, 14 to go, 8 days left.

As you may know, my husband Ken and I do an Oscar Run every February, a challenge which often means seeing at least up to 3 movies a day for a month. We’ve done this together since 2000, and I’ve blogged it since 2009.

This year has been a little different. We’re still seeing just as many movies — in fact, 46 movies in 34 days, our highest total ever — and I’m still blogging about it. But I’m now blogging it for my company, DivX (maker of video compression technology and a division of digital entertainment giant Rovi). To stay on the proper side of copyrights, I’m calling this the Major Award Movie Sprint.

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Found this on supercut.org, and it says it all. Get thee there and laugh.

Tonight I go to my first-ever blogging conference. I admit, I’m feeling a bit nervous. What if the other kids don’t like me? What if no one sits with me at lunch? What if I forget my locker combination? (Oh wait, last last bit of anxiety is left over from high school.)

But seriously, if you’re going to BlogHer 2011 in San Diego, here are the reasons you should look for me:

- I live here in town. About a half-mile from the Convention Center, in fact. If you spill syrah on your new wrap dress, mine is the closest free laundry room.

- I know the SD Convention Center like the back of my hand. No kidding! I just spent days of my life standing in line there during Comic-Con. If you want to know how to unlock the glass doors on the West Terrace, I’m your girl. (Don’t try it. Trust me.)

- I’m new to this conference, and have no posse, so being nice to me is easy and gets you extra karma points.

Follow my #BlogHer11 tweets at @thepegisin!

I can’t believe it’s been a year since this happened.

Here’s a photo album of some of Rabbit’s cutest moments, captured with my phone camera.

Today we will lay a stone for Rabbit where we buried him in the backyard. Felt very weird and adult to order such a thing, but Rabbit surely deserved it. We got ours from Peternity. They were very respectful and concerned with accuracy, and the result is beautiful. And heavy, in more ways than one.

Rabbit's stone

That’s what happens when you get a job in social media. You stop actually blogging.

I’ll be back soon, I promise.

In the meantime, go check out the awesome blogs on my new project, Tree.com. We have over 130 bloggers there, covering such things as travel, small business, law, money, and food. You know, all the good stuff.

With Netflix and Hulu streaming to our connected Blu-Ray player, Netflix mailing discs to our house with regularity, and us running to the theater sometimes four times in one day, you’d think this year’s Oscar Run would be one of our most complete ever. So how is it we’re going to miss 9 movies, the most we’ve missed in years?

Perhaps there’s easier access to movies in general, but not all movies. Particularly those who live in a purgatory of “just left theaters, not yet on DVD.” Add to that the Oscar categories that almost always put a movie you’d rather not see on your list (best song brought in Country Strong) and those that are hard to find anyway (any film not in English) and you have a perfect storm of Oscar completist frustration.

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A personal favorite - True Grit

Every year my husband and I commit to seeing every movie nominated for an Oscar or with an Oscar nominee in it before the awards ceremony itself. This year, that meant seeing 32 movies in 33 days (excluding shorts and the 9 movies we’d already seen).

We’re not even in the industry, so we don’t get screeners to watch at home. I know, we’re nuts. We call this The Oscar Run.

Completing an Oscar Run requires a strategy, and here’s ours:
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One day getting published will seem run-of-the-mill for me. But it isn’t yet! (Squeal!)

I recently wrote a column for the San Diego Union-Tribune’s Social Media Monday about Facebook:

How Facebook can help save friendships, time and your ego

Enjoy!

…And I didn’t have to die, sleep with the President, or get taken hostage! Awesome.

I recently wrote a column for the San Diego Union-Tribune’s Social Media Monday about tweetups:

Social Media Monday: How to meet those you tweet

Enjoy!